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THE GOVERNOR S ROOM IN THE CITY HALL 



THE BOOK OF 
NEW YORK 

By 
ROBERT SHACKLETON 

^u//z«r ./"The BOOK OF BOSTON." 

.'UNVISITED PLACES OF OLD EUROPE." ETC. 




Illustrated with Photographs 
,ndM Drawings hyR.h.^OYE^ 

THF PENN PUBLISHING 
COMPANY PHILADELPHIA 

1917 



(i 



COPYRIGHT 
19 17 BY 

THE PENN 
PUBLISHING 
COMPANY 




The Book of New York 

DEC22!9I7 



f^:)pi A -I tt I fi7i; 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 
CHAPTER 

I A City Young and Old 1 

II The Geeat Indifferent City .... 14 

III Down at the Battery ^4 

IV The Church and the Street .... 44 
V Around City Hall Park 57 

VI "Million-footed Manhattan" .... 70 

VII Up the Bowery ^-'- 

VIII Some Contrasts of the City .... 97 

IX Among the Tenements 107 

X Tammany ^^^ 

XI The City of Foreigners 1^5 

XII Two Notable Squares 14'7 

XIII Gramercy and Stuyvesant and Old 

Chelsea ^^^ 

XIV Up Fifth to Forty-Second 1^^ 

XV Above Forty-Second 1^''' 

XVI On Murray Hill 20o 

XVII Midst Pleasures and Palaces .... 213 

XVIII Superstitions of the City 228 

XIX Streets and Ways 241 

XX The Region of Riverside . . . • • -258 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEK PAGE 

XXI To JuMEL AND Van Cortlandt .... 268 

XXII Hamilton and Burr 280 

XXIII Where IMany Thousands Dwell . . .290 

XXIV Up the Hudson 302 

XXV West Point 317 

XXVI Down the Bat 328 

XXVII In Greenwich Village 343 

XXVIII Washington Square ....... 357 



ILLUSTEATIONS 

The Governor's Koom in the City Hall . . Frontispiece 
Madison Square Garden . . . Title Page Decoration 

PAGE 

The Brooklyn Bridge (heading) 1 

The Statue of Liberty (initial) 1 

The Bowling Green (tailpiece) 13 

The Hall of Fame (initial) 14 

Staircase and Rotunda of the Old City Hall (facing) 16 

Poe's Cottage (tailpiece) 33 

The Old House on the Battery .... (initial) 34 

The Battery (facing) 36 

Lower Manhattan (tailpiece) 43 

The Stock Exchange . . . . . . (initial) 44 

Old Trinity, far overtopped by Office Buildings 

(facing) 46 

Fraunces Tavern (tailpiece) 56 

St. Paul's on Broadway (initial) 57 

The Old City Hall and its Setting . . . (facing) 66 

Statue of Nathan Hale (tailpiece) 69 

The Equitable Building (initial) 70 

IMinetta Street (tailpiece) 80 

Statue of Peter Cooper (initial) 81 

The Sherman Statue ...... (facing) 84 

Old St. Mark's (tailpiece) 96 

The Ancient Church in Eastchester . . (initial) 97 

The End of 106th Street (tailpiece) 106 

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine . . (initial) 107 

Among the Tenements: Rivington Street (facing) 108 



ILLUSTEATIONS 



PAGE 

123 
124 



Manhattan Bridge (tailpiece) 

^^^11 Street (i^^^ial) 

The City Hall (,,i,pi,,^) ,3, 

The Shopping Stretch of Fifth Avenue . (initial) 135 

The Heart of Chinatown (tailpiece) 146 

The Appellate Court (initial) 147 

The Towers of Madison Square . . . (facino-) 150 

The Farragut Monument (tailpiece) 157 

Statue of Petrus Stuyvesant .... (initial) 158 

Studio Buildings in East 19th Street . . (facing) 160 

Gramercy Park and the Pla^^ers Club . . (facing) 164 

168 



The Oldest House in New York . . . (tailpiece) 
The Old Eleventh Street Corner . . . (initial) 
' 1^^^ ^^^^^^ Cluirch Around the Corner " . (facing ) 174 

186 
187 
190 
204 
205 
210 



The New York Public Library .... (tailpiece) 

St. Patrick's Cathedral (initial) 

Forty-Second Street near Fifth Avenue . (facing) 

The Metropolitan Museum (tailpiece) 

The Grand Central Terminal .... (initial) 

The Obelisk in Central Park .... (facing) 

On the Park Side of Fifth Avenue . . . (tailpiece) 212 

.. ' ^ ~ - 213 



Madison Square Garden (initial) 

Classic Pillars of the Pennsylvania Station (facing) 216 

227 
228 
234 
240 



The Hispanic Museum (tailpiece) 

A Hester Street Corner (initial) 

The Lights of Broadway (facino') 

The Custom House .* (tailpiece) _„ 

The Corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue (initial ) 241 

The College of the City of New York . . (tailpiece) 257 

Grant's Tomb (initial) 258 

The Beginning of Riverside Drive . . . (facing) 260 

Columbia University (facing) 264 

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument . . (tailpiece) 267 

The Van Cortlandt Mansion .... (initial) 268 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The Jmnel Mansion (tailpiece) 279 

The Statue of Hamilton in Central Park . (initial) 280 

New York from the Bay (tailpiece) 289 

Entrance to Prospect Park (initial) 290 

The Brooklyn Museum (tailpiece) 301 

Staircase in the Philipse ]Manor Hall . . (initial) 302 

The Hudson near Fort Washington . . (facing) 304 

Irving's Home, Sunnyside (tailpiece) 316 

The Medieval Effect of West Point . . (initial) 317 

West Point and the Highlands . . . (facing) 322 

The West Point Chapel ...... (tailpiece) 327 

The Old Moravian Church (initial) 328 

Billopp House (tailpiece) 342 

Old Wrought-Iron Newel Posts . . . (initial) 343 
A Bit of Greenwich Village: Milligan Place 

(facing) 346 

Corner in Old Greenwich (tailpiece) 356 

The Benches of Washington Square . . (initial) 357 
Washington Arch : the Gateway of Fifth Avenue 

(facing) 360 

Washington's Words in Stone . . . • (tailpiece) 369 






^ 



•^!.? 



I lilrfe^ 










THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 



CHAPTER I 



A CITY YOUNG AKD OLD 

|INE old Frenchman that he was, 
when he came back over the 
ocean to us a half century after 
his youthful advent, Lafayette 
appreciated to the full the finely 
delightful qualities which he rec- 
ognized in the character of our 
principal city. ''I shall love 
New York," he said; "Mon- 
sieur, I shall love New York so 
well that I may never be able to 
get away from it!" And this 
expresses the ke^mote of New 

York, its magnetic quality, the way in which it draws, 

attracts, allures. 
He who writes of New York should take the city 

seriously, yet not too seriously. The city is so great, 

so mighty, so tremendous, in population, in wealth, 




THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

in power, in achievements, that any tendency to over- 
estimate should be checked, that every claim to impor- 
tance should be carefully weighed, that the subtle 
danger of over-admiration should be avoided. That 
excellent New York poet of long ago, Fitz-Greene 
Halleck, felt and expressed all this when he wrote : 

"And on our City Hall a Justice stands: 
A neater form was never made of board ; 
Holding majestically in her hands 
A pair of steelyards and a wooden sword, 
And looking down with complaisant civility — 
Emblem of dignity and durability." 

But when, mth every tendency to yield over-ad- 
miration or over-importance fully in hand, one looks 
at New York seriously, soberly, with intent to see 
only what is fairly to be seen, it is seen as a city of 
immense and wide interest. 

Far more than any other city, whether of the past 
or of the present, New York is one that is both young 
and old. Insistently young, vociferously young, ob- 
viously young, it at the same time displays all the 
qualities of maturity. It is a city of today, yet also 
a city of three centuries. 

This marks it, among cities, more than does any 
other of its myriad characteristics. There are the 
vivid, vital evidences of 3'outh, the fire of youth, the 
strength and vigor and crudity and ruthlessness and 
inconstancy of youth ; it is a city as new and as crude 
as the newest of mining to'wais and of as gay an irre- 
sponsibility : yet it is also a city with the sadness, the 
earnestness, the gravity, the solidity, the balance, the 

2 



A CITY YOUNG AND OLD 

impressiveness, of age. Eiglitly seen, its chasmed 
streets are but wrinkles cut by the years. 

Looking at the tens of thousands of new buildings, 
the miles and miles of new-made thoroughfares, it is 
the very newest of all cities: yet it is also one that 
possesses the salt and the savor of time. One needs 
but remember that in old St. Mark's Church there lies 
buried a man who, of powerful influence on the life 
and development of this, his beloved towTi, was ruler 
here while the long-ago Thirty Years' War was rag- 
ing, was born when Elizabeth was Queen of England 
and while Shakespeare was splendidly in mid-career. 

In everything. New York is the city that is differ- 
ent. When considering Boston, Philadelphia, Chi- 
cago, San Francisco, it is customary to speak of what 
their people think or are or do, but no one ever speaks 
thus of the people of New York, but only of the city 
itself. For the city is so much greater than its peo- 
ple! With New York, the city makes the people; 
elsewhere, the people make the city. 

Always it has been a restless city; and Adrian 
Block, who built the first handful of houses here, over 
three hundred years ago, and here built and launched 
the first vessel built in America, named that vessel of 
Manhattan the Unrest, as if with a touch of in- 
spired insight. And Verazzano, who was here long 
before Block ; coming, indeed, in the reign and in the 
service of him of 'Hhe longest nose in history," as 
the New Yorker, Henry James, described that pic- 
turesque king, Francis the First ; also saw Manhattan 
with the eye of prophecy, for he set down in his re- 

3 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

port that the island seemed to be a place of wealth! 
It seemed to him a place of gold, of jewels, of furs — 
and it is still a place of gold and of jewels and of 
furs. 

Never was there any other city that so rapidly and 
ruthlessly tears down and throws away. It would 
seem as if the motto of New York were ' ' Never save 
for tomorrow what can be destroyed today!" It 
builds swiftly, makes immense advances swiftly, but 
as swiftly destroys what it has built : dwelling houses 
and business buildings that have gone up like magic 
disappear like magic, in single gaps, in rows, in 
streets, in four-square blocks. Nothing, however 
new and costly, is permitted to stand for a moment 
in the path of public or private improvement. For 
new thoroughfares, for burrowing subways, for 
bridge approaches, massed houses vanish; and other 
buildings, in number innumerable, vanish that there 
may arise triumphant business structures or apart- 
ment houses such as elsewhere the world has never 
seen. The story, cheerfully typical, is told, of a vis- 
itor of note, that he was driven uptown, in the morn- 
ing, to be toasted and greeted and to meet some of the 
city's best, and that in the afternoon he was taken 
back over the same route that he might see what 
changes had meanwhile taken place ! 

When New York is referred to, whether by New 
Yorkers themselves or by others, Manhattan Island, 
or the Borough of Manhattan as it is now ofiicially 
known, is usually meant, although there are also the 
Boroughs of Brooklyn, of Queens, of Eichmond, of 

4 



A CITY YOUNG AND OLD 

the Bronx, within the limits of the Greater City. In 
all, it is estimated that now the population is more 
than that of London; that Greater New York leads 
the world! 

Manhattan is an Indian word, Americanized. As, 
at one end of the State, the softly lilting ''Neeaw- 
gawrah, ' ' with its accent on syllables first and third, 
was harshly changed to "Nyaggaruh," so, at this end 
of the State, the ' * Manattan ' ' of the Indians, without 
an **h," and prettily pronounced, as it was, with its 
accent on syllable one, was harshly transformed in 
accent and given a "hat"! — with about the same 
effect indeed, as that of putting an American hat on 
an Indian in his native dress. There are still a few 
Indians in the region of the James River, in Virginia, 
where John Smith and Pocahontas and Powhatan 
played their drama of life and death, and I have heard 
them speak of their great chief of the past, with the 
easy ripple, accenting syllable one, of *'Powattan," 
quite discarding the "hat," as Manhattan Indians 
would similarly do with their own name, were there 
any Manhattan Indians existent. 

Never in history has there been such a magnificent 
city. It draws the great and the little; the masters 
of finance, of railroads and manufacturing, the lead- 
ers in law and surgery and authorship and art, and 
millions of little folk as well; while the rest of the 
country looks on jealously, feels jealous, is jealous — 
but New York, when she thinks of them at all, knows 
that the very men who talk depreciatingly of her are 
getting ready to come to her by the next train. 

5 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

More and more of the wealth of the world centers 
here. In spite of misconceptions which come from 
extravagant statements, whether made seriously or 
as witticisms, New York is a safe city, a city to which 
capital gladly comes and where the average individ- 
ual lives a protected and happy life. Naturally and 
inevitably, there is temptation where there is such 
vastness of wealth ; naturally, there is crime ; but on 
the whole, for those who wish safety, safety comes 
as a matter of course. 

It is a city which is more criticised, by its own peo- 
ple and by others, than any other city in the world 
was ever criticised. At the same time it is essen- 
tially so great a city that not only is every New 
Yorker proud of being a New Yorker, but every other 
American, away from his own home town, no matter 
what that town may be or how dearly he may honor it, 
is pridefully titillated if taken for a New Yorker, for 
the very name carries with it the implication of alert- 
ness, of power, of ability. ''Whatever is, is wrong," 
is what people love to say of New York, yet all, no 
matter how reluctantly, or with what misgivings, ad- 
mire its might. 

That it should develop skyward is held against the 
city as one of the most common reproaches ; yet this 
development was but meeting an exigence with 
sagacity. Narrowed closely between rivers and bay, 
and thus barred from the usual development of the 
usual city, sidewise and outward, this unusual city 
found its natural development to be up toward the 
sky; whereupon, toward the sky it went, with thou- 

6 



A CITY YOUNG AND OLD 

sands of people in the offices of single structures, and 
with banks of elevators of from five to thirty or so ; 
and with much of positive beauty, and not only costli- 
ness, in many of these wonderful office buildings. 
The streets between these dizzy heights are like roads 
through narrow defiles between mountains. I have 
seen, in the Alps, the white summits, far above me, 
aglow with the splendor of sunset, while the road it- 
self was darkened by the gloom of evening, and I 
have often thought of this when, looking up from 
some canyon street of New York, where the shadows 
have already gathered, I have seen, far above, white 
towers still glowing with the sunset glory of purple 
and gold. 

Fired by the greatness of New York, Fernando 
Wood, its mayor, in 1861 proposed in a message to 
the Common Council that it should secede from the 
Union and become independent. He looked upon the 
secession of the South as certain, and was anxious 
that New York emulate and outdo the glories of the 
long-ago free cities of Germany. New York, im- 
perially alone, was to be the wonder of the world ! — 
alone, except for Staten Island and Brooklyn, which 
it was to annex and then to take the name of Tri- 
Insula! But with the firing on Fort Sumter the 
proposal of Mayor Wood was instantly thrust aside 
and forgotten. 

New York is a kaleidoscopic city, an active city, a 
city with the touch and tang of leadership, a city that 
has always welcomed. Some other cities receive even 
the most worthwhile newcomer with hesitation and 

7 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

doubt. But make yourself a New Yorker, declare 
yourself a New Yorker, and New York accepts you, 
and is glad to have you, and is the more glad the 
more you are worth the having. New York welcomes 
and appraises, whereas in some of the other Eastern 
cities you will never really be accepted, no matter 
how wonderful, how able, how brilliant, you may be ! 
If you would advance in art, in letters, in business, 
New York treats you as one of her children; if you 
would be a social climber, it is not necessary to have a 
family tree to climb by, as it is in Boston and Phila- 
delphia. 

From the first. New York has been cosmopolitanly 
planned. From the first it has stood for broad toler- 
ance, and has welcomed all nationalities and all be- 
liefs. As early as 1643, so it has been stated, there 
were people of eighteen nationalities here. 

The Dutch set a broad example in a day of narrow- 
ness by declaring that all religious sects should be 
treated alike. The city, then a tiny place, gave shel- 
ter both to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson 
when they fled from New England persecution. 
Jesuit Fathers, fleeing from the Indians, were wel- 
comed and given free transportation to Europe. 
Hebrews, with wonderful tolerance for that early 
day, were admitted to citizenship in 1657 — and that it 
was really so wonderful is not without a humorous 
suggestion in view of the vast number of Hebrews 
who at the present day take New York citizenship as 
a matter of course. Intended victims marked for 
death by the witchcraft delusion fled here for safety, 

8 



A CITY YOUNG AND OLD 

and found it ; for the New York clergj^, while those of 
New England were flaming with the terrible zeal of 
religious persecution, gravely resolved that ''a good 
name obtained by a good life should not be lost by 
spectral accusation." 

A city of amenities, this great city of New York! 
And it is typical of the influence of the place that 
when a letter from "Washington to his wife is inter- 
cepted by the British and sent to General Howe, he 
courteously, from his headquarters in New York, 
sends it back to Washington, expressing himself as 
happy to return it without the least attempt having 
been made to discover its contents. And some time 
after this, we find Washington sending his compli- 
ments to General Howe in New York and doing him- 
self the pleasure to return a dog, picked up by some 
American troops and having the name of General 
Howe on the collar. And that Washington himself, 
who began his Presidential career in New York, 
owned dogs of such names as Juno, and Mopsey and 
Truelove, would alone point out that he himself was 
a man of amenities, a very human and a very likable 
man, indeed. 

The very air of New York exhilarates. This is no 
fancy, but a very literal fact. There is something 
extraordinarily brisk, active, inspiring about it. And 
it is not only New Yorkers who notice this, but vis- 
itors as well. **I have," wrote Thackeray, '*an ir- 
repressible longing to be in motion. There is some 
electric influence in the air and the sun here which we 
don't experience on our side of the globe. People 

9 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

can't sit still; they must keep moving. I want to 
dash into the street now. ' ' 

And the mention of Thackeray is remindful that 
New York is a city which always presents the possi- 
bilities of adventure of one kind or another ; for that 
great novelist had, in New York, an actual adven- 
ture, such as his great rival Dickens fancied in imagi- 
nation as happening to Pickwick! For Thackeray 
wrote home that, after a dinner at Delmonico's, he 
went to his hotel and began undressing, only to be 
paralyzed by a woman's voice in the alcove — for he 
had gone into a second-floor room instead of his own 
on the third! **I tremble when I think of it," he 
writes. 

Always one comes back to the idea of change, as a 
characteristic of New York ; and the very seal of the 
city is curiously typical of this. On it there still 
stands an Indian with his bow — ^no wonder English- 
men come to New York to hunt Indians on Broadway ! 
(Before passing this off as entirely a joke it is well 
to remember that one so recent as Ellen Terry, the 
actress, has set down in her memoirs that when first 
she sailed for New York, from England, it was with 
the expectation of finding the men wearing red flan- 
nel shirts and bowie knives !) And still there stands, 
on the other side of the shield, an old-time sailor, in 
knee-breeches, with a lead-line in his hand and at his 
shoulder a double cross-staff such as was long ago 
used in taking observations, and such as, indeed, was 
used by Hudson himself as he entered the harbor of 
what was to become known as New York. 

10 



A CITY YOUNG AND OLD 

Between the Indian and the knee-breeched sailor is 
a windmill. A few windmills far out on Long Island 
have continued to represent, into this twentieth cen- 
tury, this picturesque feature of the past, but it is 
difficult to realize that windmills were ever a feature 
of city life, here on Manhattan! But it was neces- 
sary to have some kind of power for mills, and there 
was no stream on the island with current sufficient, 
and so it was that windmills naturally came. Tradi- 
tion still hazily tells of the first one as standing just 
west of Broadway, and of the amazement of the In- 
dians — something like, one may presume, the amaze- 
ment of sophisticated New Yorkers who, wandering 
so far afield as toward the eastern end of Long Is- 
land, gaze in amazement at these lingering relics of 
the past. 

There was a time when windmills stood on Maiden 
Lane, and on Cortlandt Street and Park Row, and at 
other places, and they show prominently in early 
prints of the city. 

The barrels on the seal are not rum barrels, but in- 
nocent flour barrels, for an important industry of 
early New York was the milling of flour. And the 
two beavers ! It is long since beavers were on Man- 
hattan Island, even in the shape of finished skins. 
In early days, however, the island was thronged with 
beavers and a little beaver stream gave name to 
Beaver Street; even as early as 1626 one ship car- 
ried from Manhattan Island to Amsterdam over 
seven thousand beaver skins, besides the skins of 
otter, mink and other animals ; and by 1671 the prov- 

11 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

ince was furnishing over eighty thousand beaver 
skins annually. 

Immediately above the shield is an eagle ; and it is 
certainly long since an eagle fluttered down Broad- 
way! In fact, one sees that nothing on the shield is 
typical of the present day ; that these things, so typi- 
cal of the past, have gone. 

Mrs. Trollope, mother of the famous Anthony, 
came over to America, almost a century ago, and 
wrote a book of the most narrow and imfair animad- 
versions, but in one respect she was enthusiastic about 
America; she immensely admired New York. 

''My imagination is incapable of conceiving any- 
thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbor of 
New York," she wrote. ''I think New York one of 
the finest cities I ever saw. Situated on an island, 
which I think it will one day cover, it rises, like 
Venice, from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in 
the days of her glory receives into its lap tribute of 
all the riches of the earth. ' ' 

Lord Bacon, whose scientific mind loved to revel in 
details, enumerated among the things that ought to be 
seen by a traveler, the courts of princes, the courts of 
justice in session, churches, walls, fortifications and 
harbors, antiquities and ruins, libraries, colleges, 
gardens, warehouses, horsemanship and fencing, the 
training of soldiers, plays, treasuries of jewels and 
robes, and in conclusion, ''whatsoever is memorable" : 
and it seems as if one who would write of New York 
should place himself, so far as possible, in the position 

12 



A CITY YOUNG AND OLD 

of Bacon's traveler, and try to see the city from the 
traveler's standpoint. 

And one likes to remember the words of Washmg- 
ton Irving when, in 1832, he returned from Europe 
and was proudly welcomed by his city: '^s this 
not," he said, ''a city by which one may be proud to 
be received as a son!" 




s^.^ 



«?: 













13 




CHAPTER II 

THE GKE^VT INDIFFERENT CITY 

IKOM early years the greatness and fu- 
ture growth of New York were recog- 
nized; and over a century ago 
the streets of the city were 
mapped out, in detail, for al- 
most the entire extent of Man- 
hattan Island. 

Xever was there a more amus- 
ing misconception than the 
often-repeated one that the 
north side of the City Hall was made of cheaper ma- 
terial than the front because no one was ever ex- 
pected to live north of it and that therefore it would 
never be seen, for before the City Hall was built 
the growth of the city northward was recogTiized. 

Commissioners, appointed to map out the streets 
for the population of the future, worked on the task 
from 1807 to ISll, and produced the most amazing 
prophecy in the annals of any city. For, after all, 
Xew York was then but small. It was lusty and 
vigorous and confident, but in wellnigh two centuries 
of existence had not extended thickly for much more 
than a mile from the Battery. And here came com- 

14 ' 



THE GREAT LVDIFFEEENT CITY 

missioners who, with the eye of faith, saw the coming 
development and planned out streets for miles and 
miles to the northward, over land that was then but 
sparsely dotted with tiny villages and scattered farm- 
houses, with here and there a mansion. They ac- 
tually mapped out the plan of the city to 155th Street, 
inspired by the basic l>elief of the time; they were 
pjrophets inspired by the sense of popular confidence. 

But they were not poetical prophets; they dis- 
cerned the future, but they met the situation prosai- 
cally. They did not attempt charm in their plan; 
there was, with the streets, to be naught of circles 
and crescents such as those of Edinburgh or Bath, 
naught of great and ordered vistas or of avenues 
radiating from a central point,, as one sees in Paris 
or as had even then been begun in "Washington. They 
saw, in the great slim water-girdled city of the future, 
a problem to be met, not prettily but prosaically; 
there was frankly to be a triumph of utilitarianism. 

They themselves realized this. They discussed 
circles and stars and ovals and radiants, but then set 
down, stolidly, that **The commissioners could not 
but bear in mind that a city is to be composed prin- 
cipally of the habitations of men, and that straight- 
sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to 
btuld and the most convenient to live in." And all 
the artists and art commissions of Xew York have 
never been able to get over the result of their work. 

Pick up the map which they made, back before the 
War of 1812, and you wiU think that you are looking 
at a map of today, unless you notice the date, and 

15* 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

unless you notice no Central Park, and that Madison 
Square was to be much larger than it was linally 
made, for their plan contemplated the extent of Madi- 
son as from 23rd to 34th Streets and from Third 
Avenue to Seventh, to give ample space for a reser- 
voir of water and for the gathering and training of 
troops. 

They felt dubious about developing above 155th 
Street, where the lower stretch of the Harlem, with 
its marshy flats, was reached. In time, they thought, 
a still farther district might be built up, but that, as 
they said, might not be for centuries. But so far as 
155th Street it seemed to them a very practical prop- 
osition; and this at a time when the city had not 
seriously extended beyond City Hall Park and when 
little Greenwich Village was a distant and separate 
place ! 

They worried somewhat about how their plan, con- 
cretely expressing the city's vague dream, would be 
taken; some, they said, would expect them to chart 
streets even beyond 155th; to others, "It may be a 
source of merriment that the commissioners have 
provided space for a greater population than is col- 
lected at any spot on this side of China"; but they 
bravely set forth their ideas, gridironing the coming 
city with streets all at right-angles. 

Practical men though they prided themselves on be- 
ing, tliej^ made a most unpractical blunder : a mistake 
which has proved to be both awkward and costly. 
For they ought to have known that the proper way 
to develop New York for the street traffic of the 

16 




STAIRCASE AND ROTUNDA OF THE OLD CITY HALL 



THE GREAT INDIFFEEEXT CITY 

future was the exact contrary of their plan : that in- 
stead of having a few avenues running lengthwise 
and most of the streets running crosswise, it should 
have been seen, from the shape of the island, that the 
future traffic would need more highways and nearer 
together, lengthwise, north and south, and not so 
many near together, leading east and west. The 
gridiron should have been turned sidewise. If there 
had been more north and south highways, the natural 
direction of the city's main traffic, the congestion 
problem would have been avoided, and New York 
would not have had to meet and face, as it is still 
meeting and facing, an immense expense in the open- 
ing of more north and south thoroughfares. 

When the city came to the matter of lajdng out 
Central Park, a half century later — for thus rapidly 
had the city grown, as if to justify the early confi- 
dence ! — men of an unutilitarian tj^pe were chosen for 
the work, and they succeeded beautifully. They were 
a small board, consisting of the Mayor, two other city 
officials, and three citizens; and what a three those 
citizens were ! — for they were William CuUen Bryant 
the poet, and George Bancroft the historian, and 
Washington Irving! And the plans that they made 
and set in motion, or which they in their noble spirit 
inspired landscape artists to dream of, were of a 
kind so superb as to give New York one of the finest 
parks of any city in the world, with wealth of water 
and rocks, and diversified heights and levels, and 
greenery. 

New York has quite forgotten that it ever pos- 

17 



TIIK r^OOK OF \FAV YORK 

jjossod Bancroft; it has t'oviiotton that it possessed 
Bryant, although he lived for some time at -4 AVest 
loth Street, and for a loiii^or period at nearby Koslyn, 
ou Long Island. And tltat it has not forgotten Irving 
is an exception to its usual indilYerent way. 

New York's way of ignoring even her greatest folk, 
and her readiness to be thoroughly critical when she 
does notice them, has had a marked etTect in lessening 
the ^'aluo of her historical and literary associations in 
the public mind. Alexander Hamilton and Washing- 
ton Irving have been the two that have come nearest 
to receiving her whole-souled and continued admira- 
tion, but even these have not been given adulation 
approacliing the adulation customary in such a city as 
Boston. In Boston, a man of ability has always ex- 
pected 10 be taken very seriously, and has always 
taken himself very seriously. Boston, from the tirst, 
not content with its really great men and really great 
events, that it nobly honors, has also exploited even 
the tiniest happenings in its history, and has pin- 
nacled even second-rate and third-rate men. especially 
politicians and authors. Xew I'ork. going to the 
other extreme, has taken its even notable events and 
people very lightly. Always, its tendency is to think 
of the future rather than of the past. 

Before the K evolutionary clash began, Xew York 
had expressed de:fiance of England — but after the war 
was over forgot to talk abotit it ! In Januaiy of 1770, 
long before the conflict at Lexington, even two months 
before the so-called Boston Massacre, men of Xew 
York skirmished with the British on Golden Hill, in 

IS 



THE GBEAT DsDjL- l i^-EST CITY 

tibe Yimaty of J<dm and WflH&m Streets, f cfflowing 
disputes about taxes and imposts sad the alternate 
netting Tip and tiirowiiig down of tiie Liberty Poie, 

and here coo. Golden TTfil s^Teral Hves ^rere thns eariy 
lost: but ^rfien the war was over Xew Yoric made 

noth: ' '- ' ^' " ' ' ' - -=^ event in its historv ! Y^ it was 
a nor , . nght on OoLden HfTI. It was not 

a thing to forget. For they were the British regulars 
that the Xew Yorkers fought, and the blood shed was 
probably the first blood shed in the War of the Bevo- 
Intion. 

Washington Irving was bom in this Golde:! TTHl 
region, in a honse. long since destroyed, or. vTiHiiZi 
Street, between John and I'niton- And it is o~l:ig, 
in considerable degree, to Irving that New T:r> Li= 
refused to take itself serionsly ; althon^ on the oth^r 
hand it may be said that Irving was in great degree 
only reflecting, in this, the spirit of his native t 'j-si- 

For Irving wrote a history of X ew York : it was a 
famnoroTis book, a Knickerbocker historv. as he called 
it, thns coining that deli^itfiil word, which was 
promjrtly adopted as meaning old families of Dutch 
ancestry, and then also as meaTifng short trousers, 
after Cmikshaiik delightfully illustrated the volume 
with short-breeched Dutchmen. The historv pleas- 
antly made light of dignitaries of the i>ast, and its 
success did much to intensify the general tendency of 
the city toward a sort of chaSng attitude, although 
Irving wrote only of the earlv Dutch regime. 

His humorous viewpoint, hLs refusal to take digni- 
taries seriously, was adopted in the general viewpoint 

19 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

toward any sort of dignity or distinction. Dutchmen 
seemed fmmy to Irving, and he expatiated on that 
feature, emphasizing the size and quantity of their 
breeches, and the length of their pipes, and their gen- 
eral deliberateness of conduct. He might, had he 
wished, have written seriously enough of even the 
Dutch; of their frightful slaughter, for the mere lust 
of killing, of a hundred or so friendly Indians who 
had sought shelter on Manhattan from war parties of 
Mohawks; he might have written with much gravity 
of the war that followed, and of the hiring of a cer- 
tain New Englander, one Underhill, who had dis- 
played such cold cruelty toward New England In- 
dians that the Dutch eagerly paid him to come here 
to manage a massacre, near what is now Bedford, 
with the shooting or burning of some five hundred 
men, women and children, without the loss of a single 
life among those who did the killing. 

But Irving frankly laid stress on the light and 
humorous features of the Dutch and their times, and 
the humor was really there in plenty, and he made 
himself and New York famous with it, even abroad ; 
Sir Walter Scott read his Knickerbocker book and 
from it prophesied Irving's coming greatness, and 
greeted him as a friend and literary brother when he 
went to Abbotsf ord. 

With that book, early in his career, Irving sounded 
the natural New York keynote of frivolousness to- 
ward the past, and helped to intensify it. It was 
easy to encourage indifference in the great growing 
indifferent city which, though at times ready to flare 

20 



THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

into enthusiasm, quickly forgets. And perhaps New 
York could not be the greatest exponent of the future 
if she permitted herself to think of the past. 

Irving was quite capable, when he chose, of 
handling historical subjects with sober dignity, as in 
his life of Washington ; and that he and Washington 
once met, and how they met, is among the prettiest 
of all the incidents of New York history. 

Irving was born in the year which marked the close 
of the Revolution, 1783, and therefore his first name 
of Washington came naturally; and in 1789, Wash- 
ington, then living in New York as President of the 
United States, was one day spoken to, in a shop, by a 
Scotch maid, who modestly called his attention to a 
little boy beside her, of whom she was in charge ; for, 
recognizing Washington, the maid wished him to 
know that the lad had been given the name of Wash- 
ington in his honor; whereupon the tall grave man 
put his hand on little Irving 's head and said a few 
simple words of good wishes ; and one knows that this 
chance meeting must deeply have influenced Wash- 
ington Irving throughout his entire life, and that, no 
matter how excellent a man he would in any case have 
been, it must have aided in keeping him to standards 
of sweetness and honesty and kindliness: and never 
was there a sweeter and kindlier career than that of 
Irving. 

He is directly connected with New York City. He 
lived for a time in that immensely distinguished line 
of buildings, with great long front of huge Corin- 
thian pillars, on Lafayette Street (once Lafayette 

21 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Place), known as Colonnade Row, w^hicli had been 
named, at first, likewise in honor of Lafayette, La 
Grange Row. The Row has dwindled in recent 
years; it has become shorter and shorter by demoli- 
tion and soon it must all vanish. Long ago it lost all 
atmosphere of fine living, yet here wealthy New 
Yorkers dwelt, and in one of the houses President 
Tyler married Julia Gardiner of Gardiner's Island, 
the bit of land just off shore out toward the end of 
Long Island which, granted two and a half centuries 
ago as Gardiner's Manor, has remained the only un- 
broken manor in the country, for its extent has been 
neither altered nor diminished since the original 
grant; and, an even stranger fact, it is still in pos- 
session of a lineal descendant of the first Gardiner. 
There was no modest shrinking from publicity at the 
Tyler-Gardiner wedding! It was, indeed, an exam- 
ple to the contrary ; for after the ceremony the bride 
and groom were driven down Broadway behind four 
white horses to a waiting w^arship. 

Still more closely associated with Irving than 
Colonnade Row is the house, still looking much as 
when he lived there, on Irving Place, at the corner of 
17th Street. The surroundings, however, have 
greatly changed, for in Irving 's day there was a 
great open space stretching off toward the East 
River. It is a smallish building of gray brick, three 
stories and a basement in height. Fronting on Irv- 
ing Place are pleasant mndows, with an iron balcony 
running the width of the house, and a slightly pro- 
jective bay, of w^hite wood supported on slender iron 

22 



THE GEEAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

rods ; the entrance to the house being by iron balus- 
tered steps of bro\vn stone on the 17th Street side. 
In this house, and even more in his charming home of 
Sunny side, up the Hudson, Irving delightfully met 
the finest folk of his day. 

Literary fancies change ; but much of what Irving 
wrote is still as fascinating to modern taste as when 
he wrote it. His "New York," however, makes, in 
large part, hard reading, and one wonders that it so 
delighted his period. It pleased giants as well as 
little folk. Not only was the general public de- 
lighted with it, and Scott delighted with it, but 
Dickens has recorded that, coming down from New 
Haven to New York by boat, he cut short a nap, so as 
not to miss seeing Hell Gate and the Hog's Back and 
other localities made famous by the Knickerbocker 
volume. 

Dickens also admired the other work of Irving, 
that which is still so fresh and so altogether charm- 
ing, and when, later, he came down the Hudson to- 
ward New York, he looked eagerly for all the locali- 
ties of that delightful region, made famous by the 
writer whom every one loved. 

It is interesting to know that there was for a time 
a pleasant association between Irving and John 
Howard Payne, and that the two collaborated in the 
writing of a play called ' ' Charles the Second, ' ' which 
has usually been ascribed to Payne alone, and which, 
after being acted in London, was presented in New 
York, in 1824, in the long ago vanished Park Theater, 
the fashionable theater of early New York, which 

23 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

seated twelve hundred, and was the resort of the best 
people of the time whenever an excellent play was 
given. 

That the author of ''Home, Sweet Home" was a 
New Yorker, born here in 1791, is another of the facts 
that New York has never greatly heeded. 

Joseph Rodman Drake, who died in 1820 at the age 
of twenty-five, v/as a New Yorker who, like Irving, 
recognized in the Hudson River a pictorial subject. 
He wrote the liltmg rhjTues of the "Culprit Fay," 
which, although it made no fixed impression in litera- 
ture, was notable as an early American work. 

And he did write one memorable and remembered 
thing, his "Ode to the American Flag," with its ring- 
ing lines : 

''When Freedom from her mountain height 

Unfurl 'd her standard to the air, 
She tore the azure robe of night, 

And set the stars of glory there!" 

Drake also discovered and wrote about the beauties 
of the Bronx, long afterwards to be rediscovered by 
F. Hopkinson Smith; and it is fitting that the early 
poet should be buried in that region that he loved, in 
a little graveyard now included within a park that 
has been called by his name. 

There was a Damon and Pythias friendship be- 
tween Drake and another New Yorker, Fitz-Greene 
Halleck, both of whom were born in the same year 
and both of whom struggled together for literary 
fame; and the death of Drake gave the sorrowing 

24 



THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

Halleck the opportunity that he would only too gladly 
have missed, for he wrote, in memory of his friend, 
some never-to-be forgotten lines, simple and touching 
in their measured beauty: 

' ' Green be the turf above thee, 

Friend of my better days ; 
None knew thee but to love thee, 

Nor named thee but to praise. ' ' 

Halleck also made other contributions to fame, 
among others the fiery lines beginning, "At midnight, 
in his guarded tent." Recently, picking up by mere 
chance a book of selections of poetry, published in 
New York in 1840, with its credit of this or that poem 
to Shelley or Shakespeare or Scott or whatever Brit- 
ish writer it might be, I noticed, in casually turning 
the pages, that "Marco Bozzaris" was there — but 
with the author's name quite omitted! He was 
American ; he was a New Yorker ; why should he be 
remembered or named ! 

Not only New York City, but the country in gen- 
eral, ought to give far more honor to our early au- 
thors than it is customary, except in the case of a 
very few, to give. Leaving an author's name off 
altogether, in a formal collection, is not usual, but it 
is very usual indeed to depreciate the entire early 
American literary school. Even such writers as did 
not do work that is to live forever, did at least aid in 
giving that atmosphere of literature and art without 
which no country can well produce artistic or literary 
masters. 

25 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

There are New Yorkers who will not even glance 
at a place associated with Irving or Poe or Howells 
or Mark Twain or other American authors, who go 
obediently about, following guide or guidebook, pick- 
ing out the home and the grave of this and that New 
England or Old England writer, even of such as can 
only fairly be credited with what may be called good 
literary intentions. 

Edgar Allan Poe was long a New Yorker, but he 
was an unhappy New Yorker indeed. He could not, 
either as author or editor, sufficiently impress him- 
self to secure practical returns. An unbelievably 
few dollars, was, as a general thing, the extent of his 
literary remuneration; a possible five or ten dollars 
always loomed large. For his "Raven," written 
when he was a New Yorker, he seems to have been 
paid the pitiful sum of ten dollars. 

He lived in grinding poverty in various shadowily 
remembered New York localities, and toward the end 
far up in the Fordham district, and he was so often 
without money to pay the stage fare down into the 
city that he frequently walked the entire distance in 
lonely discouragement. Such walks as, at other 
times, he took for the sake of walking, were usually 
at night ; and one evening, crossing alone on the foot- 
path over the lofty aqueduct over the Harlem River 
— a bridge which, seen from below and from a dis- 
tance, is positively beautiful, with its row of tall and 
symmetrical arches— he noticed a brilliant star di- 
rectly in front of him, whereupon there came to him 
the inspiration for the lines, with their haunting 

26 



THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

rhythm and swing, about the star-dials hinting of 
morn, their liquescent and nebulous luster, their be- 
diamonded crescent. After all, one remembers that 
Poe's first and most definite standard of poetry was 
that it be musical. 

The poor little Fordham cottage has been pre- 
served, although not quite at the original spot; the 
city, so indifferent to Poe himself, has at least kept 
his cottage. His wife, poor thing, died there, hungry 
and cold; she used to try to keep warm in bed by 
cuddling her yellow cat against her bosom, but at last 
even a cat was not enough to sustain life. And 
Poe himself soon wandered away from this great in- 
different city and at Baltimore somberly closed his 
sorrowful career. 

It is a curious thing, in regard to New York's lit- 
erary history, that a majority of its early notable 
leaders were poets. In such an eminently practical 
city as this, one would certainly have expected prose. 
Irving, indeed, wrote prose, but he was exceptional; 
and even his prose, until he was well on in his career, 
was of gay insouciance. Poets have continued to 
arise, novelists have here distinguished themselves, 
short-story writers have here done splendid work — 
but historians and philosophers have not greatly 
flourished in Manhattan soil. 

It may be added, too, that New York long ago 
seized the literary scepter of the country and took to 
itself the most prominent publications and most of 
the publishing houses. 

In the great and even vast number of authors who 

27 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

in course of time have come to call New York their 
home, it is hard to pick and choose. A man may, 
like Howells, write with skill and smoothness and 
publish book after book, only to find himself not pre- 
cisely deemed among the few to be marked for per- 
manent fame. It is curious, and one may if he wishes 
deem it unfair, but so it is, that a score of thick novels 
may be thrust aside when there suddenly appears, let 
us say, a thin-volumed *' Colonel Carter." And, too, 
Howells has always seemed to consider himself more 
of a Bostonian than a New Yorker ; a New Yorker by 
stress of circumstance, but still a Bostonian by choice. 

Henry James, too — ^well, he did admirable early 
work, but so promptly made and kept a resolve to 
live as much as possible on the other side of the 
Atlantic, even long before he formally became a Brit- 
ish subject, that perhaps he, too, need not be looked 
upon as a New Yorker. One is tempted to think that 
the most interesting of his associations with his na- 
tive city is the fact that, as a small boy, he saw Thack- 
eray, when the great Englishman was a dinner guest 
at his first New York dinner, at the home of little 
Henry's father. 

And perhaps the best, or at least the cleverest, 
commentary on the works of Henry James, intricate 
and involved as he allowed his style to become, with 
interminable length of sentences, was that of the 
witty New Yorker who announced that a new serial 
by Henry James was about to begin, and that the 
opening sentence was to be continued through six 
numbers. 

28 



THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

At the time I write, Richard Harding Davis and F. 
Hopkinson Smith, both of them now dead, loom the 
most prominent as New York writers, or at least as 
the most prominent among those who have not only 
done distinguished work in broad fields but who also 
have best presented the character and the life of the 
city itself. 

But this, probably enough, will not be permanent. 
Not so long ago, Crawford was deemed the most 
notable of this class. Before that, and especially as 
exponents of New York, came Bunner and Sidney 
Luska — but Sidney Luska is quite forgotten now, 
and Bunner, with all his bubbling cleverness, is with 
difficulty kept in mind. Still further back there was 
Winthrop ; now and then you mil still hear some old- 
fashioned New Yorker speak of him; but Winthrop 
died in the Civil War, and somehow his work seemed 
to die then too; not entirely without reason, either, 
if one may judge from his inept description of de- 
lightful Washington Square, as "a dreary place, 
drearily surrounded by red brick houses with marble 
steps monstrous white, and blinds monstrous green." 

F. Hopkinson Smith should be remembered, among 
other reasons, for so breezily pointing out that, in a 
New York apartment-house room without a chimney, 
it is quite possible to put both a fireplace and a chim- 
ney, and to have friends gather there in conf abulative 
happiness in front of a blazing fire, the ideal of ' ' four 
feet on a fender." And he loved to point out that 
even in the heart of New York there may be the 
gleam of old mahogany, there may be the shining 

29 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

glow of lights from old brass andirons, there may be 
a glorious sideboard, there may be the lovely blue of 
old china, there may be the silver sheen of ancient 
stately candlesticks. 

To the very end of his long life he kept all the en- 
thusiasm of youth. How every one loves his Colonel 
Carter ! I remember his telling me that in essentials 
he was picturing in this character his own father; 
and it touched him to know that he had made Jiis 
father so loved. He was describing a real house, in 
that story, on West 10th Street, at what was 58y2, 
behind 58, near Sixth Avenue, but only a trace of it 
now remains. And it is sorrowful to think that in 
this great indifferent city there may before long be 
only a trace of the fame of Hopkinson Smith him- 
self. 

That New York so rapidly forgets and so fre- 
quently ignores is quite typical of a deep-based 
trait: that is, that New York is a city entirely with- 
out self -consciousness ; it is so sufficient unto itself as 
not to be sensitive in the least about its dignity or its 
reputation, or to care what people think or say or 
write about it. 

As a world center, it must needs be that New York 
is greater than any of its people ; and it carries this 
feature to an extreme undreamed of in other world 
centers. The individual, no matter how towering, no 
matter for a time how dominant, finds his importance 
to be little compared with that of the city itself. It 
is a city which treats individuals as the ocean treats 
drops of water. New York does not, like other cities, 

30 



THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

claim great men ; she expects great men to claim New 
York! And over and over again one notices how 
carelessly she forgets. 

Already New York has practically forgotten that 
President Grant, up at 3 East 66th Street, wrote the 
greater part of his Memoirs, under immense financial 
and physical stress, with the shadow of death creep- 
ing over him. The city has quite forgotten that 
President Arthur died at 123 Lexington Avenue. 
Still more amazing is it that New York long ago 
quite forgot the birthplace of Roosevelt, although the 
unusual personality of the man and his having been 
President for two terms would, one should suppose, 
have kept the house an object of constant interest. 
As I write, it has just been destroyed; it was at 28 
East 20th Street; and for a long time before its de- 
struction it stood drearily unoccupied, though a res- 
taurant had for a time been there, and it bore in its 
window an invitation, so unintentionally humorous 
as almost to be pathetic, to ' ' Come in and eat where 
Roosevelt was born." 

New York has quite forgotten that he of the famous 
Monroe Doctrine, President Monroe, came to New 
York toward the close of his life and died here in 
1831: fittingly, too, on the Fourth of July, as with 
two other Presidents, Jefferson and John Adams. 

His home here was an old house, still standing, at 
63 Prince Street at the corner of Lafayette. It is a 
house of brick, once red but now weatherbeaten to 
dreary dinginess, a house with charming fanlights 
and high stoop and pleasant dormers and capacious 

31 



THE BOOK OP NEW YORK 

gables, with high ceilings, Avith well-designed door- 
frames and eight-paneled doors; but it is now a 
wreck, with the great blue sign of a ragman upon its 
center and signs of ''For Sale" on either side. 

It seems incredible, that the fact could be forgot- 
ten by any city, that the author of the declaration 
which for a century influenced the world, the declara- 
tion as to ''entangling ourselves in the broils of 
Europe, or suffering the powers of the old world to 
interfere with the affairs of the new, ' ' once made the 
city his home. Forgotten, too, is the fact that his 
body remained in the Marble Cemetery, far over on 
East Second Street beyond Second Avenue, until 
1858, when it was taken to Richmond at the request 
of the State of Virginia. 

The old cemetery, high iron-fenced in front and 
high brick walled behind, is still sedate, composed, 
with an air of quiet breeding, and, situated though it 
now is in the midst of tenement surroundings, has 
succeeded by its silent influence in maintaining a gen- 
eral air of quiet and neatness and cleanliness in the 
adjacent buildings, even though the ones whose rear 
windows open upon its old-fashioned space are 
a-flutter with vari-colored washing. 

Not to be confounded, this graveyard, with another 
"Marble Cemetery," so called, near by, entered 
through a tunnel-like entrance at 41^ Second Ave- 
nue; in this other Marble Cemetery, little and now 
hidden away, there having been buried some 1500 in 
all, many of them from the most prominent families, 
as would be expected from a most curious and now 

32 



THE GREAT INDIFFERENT CITY 

almost undecipherable inscription, that it was in- 
tended as ''a place of interment for gentlemen." 
Mohammed planned a heaven for men ; but left it for 
New York to plan a gentlemen's cemetery! 















^*^r"^"TW^^ 



3i:»*|im=20r1iCifTii:?in 




33 



CHAPTER III 



DOWJSr AT THE BATTEEY 




"HEN New York a few years 
ago wished to celebrate the 
completion and opening 
of its first subway, and 
wished to do it in a style 
commensurate with the 
city's greatness, the 
mayor suggested that ev- 
ery bell and whistle should 
sound in unison for one hour ; a great and prolonged 
din being supposedly representative of New York 
City and most fitting for the celebration of a tre- 
mendous achievement! And New York is indeed a 
city of noise — but the noise is the rattle and thunder 
and turmoil of traffic; it is not noise from choice but 
from necessity. 

And there are still several places in Manhattan 
where there is almost quiet, one of these being down 
at the lower point of the island, the Battery, where 
still there is a peaceful area of park, almost undis- 
turbed by din. 

George Washington, when as President he lived in 
this city, found his favorite walk to be, as he has re- 

34 



DOWN AT THE BATTERY 

corded in his diary, along the sea-wall of the Battery. 
And Aaron Burr, after the loss of Theodosia, the 
daughter whom he worshipped, used to pace back and 
forth, back and forth, along this sea-wall, looking 
hungrily toward the Narrows in the never to be ful- 
filled hope that a ship should appear bearing the 
one who had so mysteriously vanished at sea. 

The sea-wall is still one of the finest walks in 
the city. The land projects a little further into the 
Bay than it used to do, and the walk has therefore 
been advanced a little, but it is still almost identically 
the same as of old ; it is a walk of buoyancy for those 
who can feel buoyant, with its tang of the sea and its 
tingling breezes, and for the unhappy, like Burr, there 
are days of breezeless gloom, when the water seeps 
and sighs along the edge. To walk there is to walk 
in a place of memories. 

A beautiful approach to the Battery is from the 
Bay, on a day of sunlight, when there is a glowing 
blue of water and of sky, and the ceaseless movement 
of numberless boats. On either side there is the gen- 
tly sloping shore of Long Island or of New Jersey ; in 
front, on the left, is the great green Goddess of Lib- 
erty; on the right are the mighty curves of the 
bridges ; in the center, set in the midst of blue water, 
beneath the blue dome of the sky, there rises a clus- 
tering mass of buildings to incredible and irregular 
heights, in whites and grays and dark browns, with 
splashes of red and green. And in front of this clus- 
tered mass is the park of the Battery. 

There is dignity in the view, there is strength, there 

35 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

is superb impressiveness, there is the unexpected gen- 
tleness of greener5^ 

In the early hours of a winter's evening, when the 
myriad boats show lights of green and white and red, 
and Liberty stands in a soft and whitish glow, and 
the interminable lines of cars move over the arching 
bridges like fireflies on fairy threads, and the tower- 
ing buildings are alight, in thousands of windows, 
giving an effect as of a wonderful hill city with lighted 
houses rising tier on tier, higher and higher, it is 
one of the striking sights of the world. 

Washington, when in the long ago he walked the 
Battery walk, would have been keenly interested could 
he have known that, a quarter of a century after his 
own death, his beloved friend and associate Lafayette 
was to be received here at the Battery by enthusiastic 
New Yorkers. 

It was in 1824 that the Frenchman came back to re- 
visit America. Most of the men of the Revolution 
were then dead, and he did not know he had won a 
profound love in the hearts of all Americans. But 
he wanted to see once more the country for which he 
had given his best efforts and where the most inter- 
esting years of his interesting life had been spent. 

The changes in France had left him far from rich, 
and he was disturbed about what would be the ex- 
penses here. On the way over he talked candidly 
with a Boston merchant, a fellow passenger, about 
the cost of hotels and travel; and he accepted the 
Bostonian's invitation to dinner when he should 
reach that city. 

36 



DOWN AT THE BATTERY 

He expected, on the whole, to drift inconspicuously 
through the country. And when his ship reached New 
York and he found the Bay filled with ships a-flutter 
with flags and with their yards manned with lines of 
sailors, all in his honor ; when he saw flags in every 
direction, on the water and on the shores, and when he 
heard the roar of cannon and the ringing of bells ; he 
wept with the pathetic surprise of it all. 

He landed at the Battery— and collectors prize the 
old blue plates that picture his ship, the Cadmus, and 
Castle Garden, as it came afterwards to be called, 
which was then a fort separated from the mainland 
by a narrow strip of water ; a fort of that old cheese- 
box order of architecture which for so long a time 
appealed to army engineers. Here Lafayette was 
welcomed, and thence was driven to the City Hall, 
cheered by uncounted thousands on the streets and on 
the very roofs. And after that, throughout America, 
he found himself, wherever he went, the honored 
guest of nation or state or city or town — and there 
was no need to think of hotel expenses! And it is 
pleasant to know that when he reached Boston he 
took time from the rush of grand receptions to look up 
the Bostonian and dine with him as he had promised 
to do. 

Years after this, the city welcomed Admiral Dewey, 
here at the Battery, when he came sailing home from 
Manila, bearing his honors thick upon him ; though it 
is amusing to remember what panic he put into the 
hearts of the committee of reception by arriving one 
day sooner than was planned. However, like the 

37 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

genial gentleman that he was, he postponed his land- 
ing until everything should be prepared. I saw him, 
close by, as he stepped ashore, and never was there 
a more simple, more attractive, more unpretentious, 
more capable-looking American. He was given a 
more than royal welcome, and a parade in his honor 
was resplendent in glitter of banners and arms, and 
was of immensity of length. 

At the very edge of the sea-wall, over at one side 
of Battery Park, still stands old Castle Garden, as it 
was for many years known. It was long the receiv- 
ing station for immigrants, before that it was used as 
a hall for amusements, celebrations and public recep- 
tions, originally it was a fort (not the first fort here 
at the Battery, but built just before 1812), and now 
it is the city's Aquarium. 

Perhaps it was never of attractive shape ; certainly 
it has with the passage of years been altered out of 
any degree of attractiveness that it may have had in 
the past, although some of the old casemates are still 
preserved. It is a squatty, sprawling, many-sky- 
lighted building, with huge cupolas, a building neither 
round nor square nor octagon, but somehow suggest- 
ing each of these shapes. 

Jenny Lind's first American concert was given here, 
and stories have come down about the marvelous in- 
terest and enthusiasm that she aroused. That first 
concert gave for her share twelve thousand dollars 
which entire sum she promptly turned over to charity. 
For that first concert Barnum offered a prize of two 
hundred dollars for the best song for her and there 

38 



DOWN AT THE BATTERY 

were seven hundred competitors, and Bayard Taylor 
won the prize. On the night of the first concert, peo- 
ple who had been unable to buy seats stood in throngs 
on the water-front or filled the host of boats that were 
rowed as near as possible to the outside of the 
building. 

It is one of the amusing memories of the Battery, 
that at the time when Barnum was exhibiting the once 
well known Cardiff Giant, at Castle Garden, he was 
apparently so fearful lest some one might get at it, 
that every night, after the performance was over, he 
had the supposedly petrified man, a heavy load, borne 
across this Battery space to the old Eastern Hotel (a 
house built before 1790 and only recently destroyed, 
at the corner of "Whitehall and South Streets), where 
he kept a room for the ostensible safeguarding of his 
stone man. 

Near the Aquarium is a spirited bronze bust of 
Verazzano, and it shows him as the possessor of a 
nose as long as that of his royal master Francis. 
Here at the beginning of Broadway is a monument to 
an Italian explorer in the service of France, and sev- 
eral miles to the northward, at what was until lately 
deemed the other end of Broadway, is a monument to 
that still more famous Italian who made his explora- 
tions in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

At the opposite side of the open space from the 
Aquarium, just where the park curves into State 
Street, is a house, Number 7, which has figured in one 
of Bunner's stories, ''A New York House," and which 
instantly attracts attention from its unusual and dis- 

39 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

tinguished appearance. It was built shortly before 
the year 1800 by a New York merchant whose wife 
was connected with a governor of Connecticut and 
with President Dwight of Yale ; which facts were very 
important in early days when the Battery houses were 
social centres. Those people never supposed that the 
house would ever become a home for immigrant girls. 
It is fronted by two sets of pillars, one set being 
round and the other square; and there is a recessed 
balcony on the level of the second floor. 

When the occupant of 1804 moved away — a certain 
Colonel Van Vredenburgh, who had served in the Rev- 
olution — he loaded his furniture into a boat at his 
front door, and then, he and his family stepping in 
after the furniture, they started on their journey far 
up the Hudson, to a new home in the Mohawk Val- 
ley : where, it somehow seems interesting to know, this 
man of the Battery became known among the Indians 
as ''The Great Clear Sky." 

Immediately to the northward of Battery Park, 
where it opens into the Bowling Green, is the begin- 
ning of Broadway. At the right, as you face toward 
this beginning, is the great gray Custom House, roofed 
in dull red, and at the left is a higher building of red 
brick with a roof in black and green. Between these 
two buildings, beyond the Bowling Green, begins a 
mighty chasm, incredibly narrow, incredibly deep and 
high, a chasm in grays and browns and whites with 
slashes of greens and reds. It is a great long gash 
among buildings, it is a canyon profound in its depth, 
it is a long valley with vertical stone walls rising to 

40 



DOWN AT THE BATTERY 

great and irregular heights and peaks and ledges. It 
is a valley deeper and more precipitous than the gorge 
of the Trossachs, and it only waits a Walter Scott of 
business to picture there some tragic or dramatic 
scene. 

The pleasant oval of the Bowling Green — which was 
really once a bowling green and has for generations 
preserved this oval shape — surrounded by its iron 
fence, is remindful of one of the romantic episodes 
of New York history; an episode which has already 
become almost a myth. And to tell of this it is neces- 
sary to drop back a little into the past. 

Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, the New 
York Assembly voted, in its enthusiasm, to set up a 
statue of King George the Third and a statue of Wil- 
liam Pitt, whereupon the statue of William Pitt was 
set up in Wall Street and that of the King in the cen- 
ter of the Bowling Green. 

This kingly statue was equestrian and was set up 
on a date which shows how ingrained was the intense 
feeling for royalty even up to the verge of the Revo- 
lution. For it was August 21, 1770 — and although in 
a short five years there were to be Lexington and 
Concord and Bunker Hill, the people were still so in- 
fatuated with royalty as to honor this birthday date 
of that Prince of Wales, who, dying before his father, 
and thus missing the throne, left only the memory 
that he was the son of King George the Second and the 
father of King George the Third, and that he was de- 
scribed in the lines, surreptitiously quoted and 
laughed about in England : 

41 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

"Here lies Fred, 

"Who was alive and is dead. 
Had it been his father, 

I had much rather. 
Had it been his brother, 

Still better than another. 
Had it been his sister, 

No one would have missed her. 
Had it been the whole generation, 

Still better for the nation. 
But since 'tis only Fred, 

Who was alive and is dead. 
No more need be said." 

The statue of Pitt was destroyed by angry British 
soldiers in the course of their occupancy of New York, 
but a fragment has been preserved and is in the rooms 
of the city 's Historical Society ; but before that on a 
July night in 1776 the Americans themselves had de- 
stroyed the statue of the King. It was in place when 
the sun went down, and when the morning came it had 
vanished. 

Few knew until long afterwards what became of 
it. It was taken to Litchfield in Connecticut, far up 
in the delightful hill country, and there, as it was of 
lead, it was made into bullets. And a record left by- 
Oliver Wolcott, one of the signers of the Declaration 
of Independence, and afterwards a general and a gov- 
ernor, tells who made the bullets and how many were 
made. 

A shed was built in the Wolcott orchard, and the 
statue, first chopped and melted in the kitchen, 
was made into bullets by women and girls of the best 

42 



DOWN AT THE BATTEEY 

blood and social position. Laura Wolcott made 8378 
cartridges; Mary Ann Wolcott made still more, for 
her total was 10,790 ; a neighbor, Mrs. Marvin, made 
6058 ; Frederick Wolcott, a lad permitted to work with 
the women at the interesting task, made 936 ; a Mrs. 
Beach made 2002; others made amounts various; and 
the total was 42,088 cartridges made. 

How and by whom the cartridges were used has not 
been recorded, except as to some minor items, such 
as the giving of 300 to the regiment of a Colonel Wig- 
glesworth — delightful name! — and the giving of sev- 
eral hundred to a Colonel Howe, and of fifty to the 
Litchfield militia on the occasion of an alarm. 

The ancient house still stands, full of years and dig- 
nity. The kitchen in which the lead was melted has 
been torn down, but the rest of the building stands 
just as it stood in the long ago ; the ancient orchard 
is still an orchard ; and the present owner, a Wolcott 
in direct descent, pointed out to me the spot where 
the bullets were made. 



^., k.^.:Ji 



43 



CHAPTER IV 




THE CHUKCH AND THE STREET 

ITTTIXGLY, the richest church in 
the worki looks do^^1l the richest 
street in the world; or at least, 
the street held to be the most rep- 
resentative of wealth. 

But ^'^all Street" is more 
than that short and narrow thor- 
onghfare; for the name is under- 
stood to iuchido. also, quite a sec- 
tion immediately adjacent. It ex- 
tends, indeed, down Broadway as far as to a quiet- 
looking building, of gray stone and with an 
ungraceful square tower, known throughout the 
world as '^ Number 26"; this being the head- 
quarters of the Standard Oil Company. "What ex- 
traordinary stories are represented by this ordinary 
looking building! What fiction, and what facts 
stranger than fiction, are called to mind by the 
thought of the centralized power that the building 
represents ! What a romance it all has been, in the 
rising up. from nothing, to an overshadowing of the 
world ! Wliat business splendidly done, what griev- 
ous busmess battles, what control of legislators, of 

44 



THE CHURCH AND THE STREET 

mayors, of town councilmen and of individuals! 
How sphinx-like the l-juilding faces Broadway, hiding 
its secrets from the world ! 

The first Secretary of the Treasury of the United 
States lived for a time in a house which stood at 
* ' Number 26 " ; and he was buried in the graveyard of 
Trinity Church, the precursor of the Trinity of to- 
day which, of sandstone so brown as almost to be 
black, stands looking down, from its position on 
Broadway, into the narrow defile of Wall Street. In 
its location, and with its great open stretch of old 
graveyard on either hand, the church is of wonder- 
ful impressiveness. 

The first Trinity, built in the reign of William of 
Orange, was burned in the great fire of 1776. It was 
rebuilt in 1790, and when this, too, was burned, the 
present structure was erected. It was completed in 
1846 and its architect was Eichard Upjohn, who did 
invaluable service to New York City by giving to it a 
number of fine and dignified churches, at a time when 
what is kno^vn as the Victorian influence was destroy- 
ing good taste upjon both sides of the Atlantic : he was 
a worshiper of the Gothic, and made his mid-century 
churches look delightfully old! The notable bronze 
doors were designed by St. Gaudens, and were surely 
inspired by the doors of the Baptistery in Florence. 

The interior of the church is dignified, with much 
of impressiveness, and there is an effect of fine spa- 
ciousness, which well matches the spaciousness of the 
burying-ground outside. The brilliant white of the 
elaborate altar and the glow of myriad colored panes 

45 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

in a great window behind it make # contrast that will 
become finer and finer as age gently softens the hues 
of the glass. 

It used to be that the spire of Trinity was the 
loftiest landmark of New York, and it seemed miracu- 
lous when skyscrapers began to mount above it. 
Henry James, less than forty years ago, writing his 
*' International Episode," put his Englishman up to 
the amazing height of seven stories in an office build- 
ing and from that immense height the roar of the 
street "sounded infinitely far below," and the man 
was startled by seeing himself on a level with a 
steeple top ! Now, Trinity spire is far below the cor- 
nices and towers of the giant buildings that cluster 
thick about that part of Broadway. 

Back in the time of Queen Anne, Trinity was given 
a royal grant of a great tract on lower Manhattan 
Island, and although the church has given away por- 
tions to this or that institution, she still holds the 
greater part of the tract, and is the greatest tenement 
house proprietor in New York, with an annual income 
of over half a million dollars, from which she assists 
in the upkeep of several churchly offshoots, officially 
her chapels, and such good works as seem fitting, and 
of course attends to her own ministry. When Doctor 
Berrian was rector of Trinity a preacher from a poor 
country parish went to him and asked for his influ- 
ence in finding a church with a larger salary, where- 
upon the good rector exclaimed, with naive earnest- 
ness, that he could not understand why clergymen so 
often wished a change: "Why," he concluded, "I 

46 




OLD TRINITY, FAR OVERTOPPED BY OFFICE BUILDINGS 



THE CHURCH AND THE STREET 

have been with Trinity Church for forty years, and 
have never thought of leaving ! ' ' 

When the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Ed- 
ward the Seventh, visited New York, he was taken to 
a service at Trinity, and close to him sat General 
Winfield Scott, that picturesque figure of our War of 
1812 with England, and in the crowded aisle beside 
the pew stood George Bancroft, historian of the Revo- 
lution! — which delicate attentions must have amused 
the eminently clear-sighted young man, as doubtless 
later he was even more amused when, visiting Wash- 
ington, nothing would do but that he must go down to 
Mt. Vernon and stand before the tomb of the man 
whose leadership had taken a nation from England's 
rule. 

In New York, besides attending Trinity, the Prince 
of Wales was made to feel that he was indeed a guest 
that the city delighted to honor, for he was taken to 
Central Park, and Cooper Union, and Barnum's 
Museum, and the Free Academy, and a Deaf and 
Dumb Institution! In fact, he was treated as New 
Yorkers always used to treat country cousins, but in 
his case there was fortunately, also, a splendid ball 
in his honor at the old Academy of Music, at Irving 
Place and 14th Street ; a building now given over to 
moving pictures, after a long career as opera house 
and theater, and at the time of the great ball only six 
years old. 

Probably the most beautiful service of Trinity is 
that of Ascension Day, when it is customary to have 
a special choir of some fifty voices, and an orchestra 

47 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

of some two-score pieces, so as to give superb music 
superbly. On this day the church is literally packed, 
and with many unable to enter, and the splendid serv- 
ice is the more effective from the knowledge that, 
while it is in progress, the rush and turmoil of busi- 
ness, of Broadway and Wall Street, are at the very 
doors. 

The noblest memory of old Trmity ought to be that, 
at a time when the World War was raging, but before 
America had plunged in, a noon-day meeting was 
regularly held here, to pray ''for the restoration of 
the world's peace, and for divine guidance for all 
men.*' The printed form, given to each who en- 
tered, expressed the hope "that a way may be found 
for the speedy restoration of just and honorable peace 
amongst all nations." 

No other graveyard in New York possesses varied 
interest to equal that of Trinity, where the stones and 
monuments are thick-clustered, and where the very 
place seems filled with thick-clustering memories. 

Not only does the first Secretary of the Treasury, 
Alexander Hamilton, lie here, but also that Gallatin 
of the three "A's," Abraham Albert Alphonse, the 
Swiss who, coming to America in 1780, and at once 
taking part in our war, held afterwards a succession 
of high offices, including that of Secretary of the 
Treasury. Both he and Hamilton are in the southern 
half of the graveyard, and on this side, too, but so 
far back as to be at the extreme verge, is the grave 
of that picturesque Eevolutionary general, highly 
trusted by Washington, who is always referred to as 

48 



THE CHURCH AND THE STREET 

Lord Stirling, although his efforts in the British 
courts to secure the Stirling earldom, with its title 
and estates, were unsuccessful: the ''self-made 
peer," Major Andre gibingiy termed him. Near the 
tomb of Stirling is that of General Kearney, of the 
Civil War — for our old churches, like the cathedrals 
of England, began, even before our entry into the 
world struggle, to put up memorials to veterans and 
victims of war after war. 

Here in Trinity churchyard is buried that Sir Dan- 
vers Osborne who, upon landing from England, 
assumed office, and after ruling as governor of New 
York for half a week, incontinently hanged himself. 
Here is the supposed grave of Charlotte Temple, 
over whose sad story, whether it was true or false, 
our forefathers and mothers loved to weep. 

Almost at the entrance of the church is the tomb 
of Captain James Lawrence, he of the Chesapeake 
and ''Don't give up the ship!" And the victorious 
English honored Lawrence when, with display and 
solemn cannonading, they sailed with his body, 
wrapped in the American flag, into Halifax. And it 
is one of the most curious similarities of literature 
that, as Oliver Wendell Holmes saved Old Ironsides 
from destruction with his vigorous and timely verses, 
in the same way Tennyson, with vigorous and timely 
verse, saved from destruction the Shannon, the con- 
queror of the Chesapeake. 

In the upper corner of the churchyard, just off the 
Broadway sidewalk, is a towering and admirable 
monument to the men of the Revolution who died in 

49 



THE BOOK OP NEW YOEK 

the English prisons of New York. There is no word 
of hate ; there is no reminder of the needless suffering 
which was inflicted upon those men. It is as if, under 
the shadow of this old church, all enmity should be 
forgotten. 

And yet, being human, one likes to remember that, 
so it seems (although, unfortunately, it is not an abso- 
lute certainty), the terrible provost Cunningham, who 
was responsible for most of the cruelty, and who 
loved to boast that he had killed more Americans than 
both Burgoyne and Cornwallis combined, was after- 
wards hanged, in London, for forgery. He had a 
nephew who as a lad assisted him and was especially 
active in extorting money for food and for any miti- 
gation of cruelty, and this nephew lived on, in New 
York, for half a century after the Eevolution, in busi- 
ness as a real estate agent. 

For a great many years, burials have not been per- 
mitted in this old Trinity burymg ground, except in 
the rare case of some member of an old family that 
possesses a Trinity family tomb. I saw, not many 
years ago, such a funeral and burial here, it being the 
funeral of a descendant of one of the earliest Dutch 
families, and it made a very impressive scene, here in 
the heart of the busiest portion of the busiest city of 
the world, in the very shadow of the Elevated trains 
that went thundering by. 

It is one of the prettiest sights in this great city, 
to see, at noontime, on pleasant sunny days, pretty 
young stenographers sprinkled about this ancient 
graveyard, sewing in the sun — not precisely Shake- 

50 



THE CHURCH AND THE STREET 

peare's charming '* spinsters and knitters in the 
sun"; but Shakespeare himself would doubtless have 
changed the word to sewing if he could have seen this 
old graveyard of Trinity on a pleasant day. 

Wall Street represents the financial supremacy of 
America, the financial supremacy of the world. It is 
no exaggeration to say that Wall Street has become 
the money capital of the nations. Here it is that the 
mighty financial affairs of Europe and Asia, of Africa 
and Australia, of our own America, are directly or 
indirectly controlled. The vast commercial interests 
of our land, the trade and the manufactures, all yield 
homage to this clump of office buildings centering 
about the narrow thoroughfare into whose gorge-like 
chasm Old Trinity so staidly looks. 

Wall Street, crowded as it is with men of money, 
lined as it is by office buildings occupied by financial 
firms whose names are known throughout the world, 
is more famous for an old building at the corner of 
Nassau Street than for the offices of even the most 
famous men of millions. The building is of gray 
stone, dulled to a deeper gray by time, and across the 
entire front are high steps, which lead up to a terrace 
and to a row of pillars of much dignity, and thus to 
the entrance. This fine old building stands where 
stood the former City Hall, wln'ch was used as a meet- 
ing place by the Continental Congress and thus 
gained the name of Federal Hall, and in front of 
which Washington took the oath of office as the first 
President of the United States. 

The great slab of brown stone on which he stood 

51 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

when taking the oath is preserved in a bronze frame 
inside the present building ; and in front is a gravely 
noble statue of Washington, by J. Q. A. Ward. That 
there is also a tablet representing Washington kneel- 
ing under a two-branched tree, with gloved hands 
raised in prayer, merely shows how both history and 
religion may be belittled. 

To suggest some of the differences between those 
days in 1789 and today, it may be mentioned, remind- 
fully, that there was no telephone then, no electricity, 
no moving pictures, no motor-cars, no telegraph; 
there was not a bathroom or a furnace or a gas jet or 
a match or a steel pen in all New York. 

And if I add that on inauguration day Washington 
wore a coat of black velvet, a white waistcoat, knee 
breeches, silver buckled shoes, yellow gloves, and a 
long dress-sword, it is only as a reminder that he was 
a careful dresser and considered that a man of posi- 
tion should pay great attention to his personal looks. 

The ''President's March" began its course of pop- 
ularity by being played at one of the receptions to 
Washington on his way here from Mount Vernon for 
the inauguration: after that, it was played in New 
York, on every possible Presidential appearance, and 
was always enthusiastically received by the public; 
and no wonder, for it was played with the tune to 
which were afterward given the words of ''Hail, 
Columbia ! ' ' 

Knowing how Wall Street is abused, by many, as a 
place of metaphorical financial pirates, it is curious 
to know that it was the shelter of a very real pirate, 

52 



THE CHURCH AND THE STREET 

the famous Captain Kidd himself ! For Kidd did not 
spend all his life on the sea or in burying treasure! 
He lived at one time on Pearl Street, here in New 
York, and, marrying a widow who lived on Wall 
Street, he became, through the marriage, the owner 
of the house at what was number 56 ; so that he was 
a veritable Wall Street man. 

It is curious about Kidd that, pirate though he was, 
and indicted for piracy, the crime for which he was 
hanged was the too hasty killing of one of his own 
piratical sailors by a blow with a bucket. 

It is odd that a more terrible and much more vicious 
pirate, of old-time days, was named Morgan; but in 
this case with no connection whatever with Wall 
Street. No one would ever have thought of Morgan 
the pirate in connection with any Wall Street name, 
had not the most prominent of Wall Street men of 
some years ago been moved by a sense of saturnine 
humor to give his yacht the piratical name of the 
Corsair and to have it painted black. 

In the early days of New York, real pirates, or free- 
booters who were looked upon as probable pirates, 
were not an uncommon sight in the streets, swashing 
about in their great hats, their flaming waist-sashes, 
and with great pistols openly showing. Some of the 
early New York fortunes were based on buying loot 
from the pirates and selling it at a great profit. 
Pirates were hanged, at New York, as recently as 
toward the middle of the nineteenth century. 

Broad Street, which is really an unusually broad 
street, is a very important part of the Wall Street 

53 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

district: during banking hours its pavement, just 
around the corner from Wall Street, is excitedly alive 
with the brokers of the picturesque "curb market," 
and here on Broad Street, facing this curb market, is 
the Stock Exchange itself. 

The Stock Exchange is a beautiful building, in some 
respects a superb building. It has an admirable row 
of little balconies, low set, along its front, above the 
entrance ways, and above the balconies is a row of 
low windows, and above them is a mighty frontage of 
glass, broad and high, against which stand six great 
grooved columns ; above these columns is a pediment, 
bearing a group of sculptured figures, emblematic of 
commerce and finance. 

Inside the building, the great floor offers an excit- 
ing sight, for it is thronged with brokers buying and 
selling, and the air is filled with frantic cries. It 
was a New York humorist who remarked, with truth, 
that *'a seat on the Stock Exchange, " costing seventy- 
five thousand dollars or so, meant the privilege of 
standing in a continuous cane-rush from ten to three ! 

One of the memories of Broad Street is that the 
great Hamilton, addressing here an excited crowd on 
the subject of the Jay Treaty with England, was 
roughly dragged down and hustled through the 
street. 

Broad Street came naturally by its great width, for 
in early days a canal led down its middle, and quaint 
Dutch houses lined each side of the placid water, which 
generations ago vanished. The houses were mostly 
of wood, except for their gable ends, which faced the 

54 



THE CHUECH AND THE STREET 

canal and were of small yellow bricks with black 
headers: the doors were large, the windows were 
small, every doorstep was immaculately clean, every- 
body clattered about in wooden shoes — it is like a 
dream to think of that picturesque Broad Street of 
so long ago. 

There still stands, at the corner of Broad and Pearl 
Street, an old house of noble memories : not so old as 
those picturesque houses of the early Dutch, but one 
of the oldest existing buildings in New York; it is 
Fraunces Tavern, and was built in 1719. 

The building has suffered from fire and from radi- 
cal alterations, but it has been elaborately restored 
by the Sons of the Revolution to an appearance con- 
siderably like that of its early years, and is a digni- 
fied, dormered building of brick. A restaurant is still 
maintained on the lower floor. On the second floor 
is the famous ''Long Room," of the same shape and 
dimensions that it was when it won its fame, and not 
without much of its original appearance, in spite of 
the somewhat too free restoration. Fittingly, the 
building has been made the depository of a great num- 
ber of Revolutionary relics; for its association with 
the Revolution was profoundly dramatic. 

For it was here, in this dignified ''Long Room," 
that Washington took farewell of his most prominent 
and trusted officers at the close of the Revolution. 
It was on December 4, 1783, and among the forty-four 
officers were Knox and Wayne, Greene and Steuben, 
Moultrie, Lincoln and Hamilton. It was a solemn 
and affecting scene. They ate together in almost 

55 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

breathless silence. Then Washington filled his glass 
with wine, and said : 

"With a heart full of love and gratitude I must now 
take my leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your 
latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your 
former ones have been glorious and honorable." 

All drank their wine; and then, one by one, they 
made their farewells ; a scene profoundly solemn and 
sorrowful. 




56 



CHAPTER V 



AEOUND CITY HALL PAEK 




ET in the very center of the front 
wall of old St. Paul's, on Broadway, 
and in the shadow of its pillared 
portico, is a tablet setting forth 
that in this church is the tomb of 
the gallant General Richard Mont- 
gomery. 

But this Broadway front, when 
the church was built, was the rear, 
and the real face of the church still 
looks out in the direction of the 
North River, between which and the church there was 
originally nothing but trees and a low bank and the 
beach. And, in strictness, St. Paul's is not a church, 
but bears only the name of Chapel, being an off- 
shoot and dependent of Trinity. 

With the exception of the spire, St-. Paul's was com- 
pleted in 1766, and its stones are almost black with 
age and dust and smoke. It is a building of a dig- 
nity in which a certain primness is mingled v/ith a 
very real sense of charm. The spire, rising in pleas- 
ing pilastered gradations, was put up in 1794. 

Looking at the Montgomery tablet, there comes the 

57 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

picture of a gallant young British officer, who, having 
recently resigned his commission, after winning 
honors under the command of Wolfe, had become a 
citizen of the Colony of New York and had fallen in 
love with the pretty daughter of one of the powerful 
Livingstons. "I have ventured to request, sir," he 
writes, with old-fashioned formality to the young 
woman's father, Judge Robert R. Livingston, 'Hhat 
you will consent to a union which to me has the most 
promising appearance of happiness, from the lady's 
uncommon merit and amiable worth." He does not, 
you see, promise happiness to the young woman, or 
speak of his own advantages, but the very naivete of 
the letter shows him as a likable young man, and both 
father and daughter were alike in so believing. And 
so they were married ; and in two years the Revolu- 
tion broke out, and at once Montgomery was ordered, 
with General Benedict Arnold, to attempt the capture 
of Quebec. And, as the story of it all comes back, one 
forgets this quiet portico and the ceaseless rush of 
Broadway, and thinks of the heroic attack, the narrow 
path along the cliff, the fierce wind and the drifting 
snow and the slippery ice, and of the whirl of grape- 
shot which marked Montgomery's death. 

The English conquerors carried his body with 
honor into Quebec, for chivalry had not then passed 
from war, and there it lay until 1818, when the State 
of New York asked that it might be yielded to the land 
of his adoption. 

With sorrowful jDomp the body was brought back, 
and the last stage of the journey was by boat dovm 

58 



AROUND CITY HALL PARK 

the Hudson. At Rhinebeck, which for their brief 
married life had been their home, Montgomery's 
widow was still living, and as the fmieral barge ap- 
proached she begged to be left alone, to see it from 
the window of the room which had been most dear to 
them, forty-three years before; and cannon thun- 
dered from the boat, and the guard stood at salute 
beside the catafalque; and when the boat moved 
slowly on into the distance, and friends went gently 
in to the hero's lonely widow, they found her fallen 
unconscious, overpowered by the rush of memories. 

St. Paul's, in its burials, seems to have been de- 
sirous to point out, even in early days, the cosmopoli- 
tan character of the city, for here lie such men as 
the Hessian Baron Nordeck, and that Sieur de Roche 
Fontaine who was aide to Rochambeau. 

Within, the church is pleasantly impressive; and, 
indeed, the interior was definitely modeled after fa- 
mous old St. Martin 's-in-the-Fields, of London. And 
there is still preserved, and held in reverence, but not 
with such reverence but that the visitor to the building 
may sit in it if he so desires, the pew which General 
Washington occupied when he lived in New York; 
Trinity, the parent church, being then but a ruin, hav- 
ing been burned during British occupancy of the city. 

St. Paul's occupies the block between Fulton and 
Vesey Streets, and at Vesey, while Broadway con- 
tinues straight on, Park Row leads off diagonally to 
the right; to the point thus formed. City Hall Park 
used to extend, and there was an admirable gateway 
here, and an admirable view of the present City Hall 

59 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK 

itself: but this fetching view was lost when a post- 
ofl5ce structure of unusual unattractiveness was built 
here, in 1875. 

Opposite the upper end of the post-office stands the 
loftiest of all skyscrapers, the Woolworth building, 
which splendidly rises in its fifty-one stories, to the 
seemingly impossible height of 750 feet. It is a noble 
building, in its dignity and in its fine simplicity, and 
points out, if the fact needs any pointing out, that a 
skyscraper may be not only a thing of necessity, in a 
city developing as New York develops, but a thing of 
beauty as well. 

With a fine air of distinction, the City Hall looks 
out over its little park. It is a building of cream 
color, mellowed and darkened by time, a building of 
perfection of outline, of peculiar attractiveness. It 
is so different from w^hat one expects to see in New 
York that it is no wonder that the newly arrived 
Irishman remarked, on first catching sight of it, that 
it was certainly not made in this country ! 

It is but two stories high, unless one counts the half 
story of a basement and the slight square attic up- 
lifted in the center, and it is surmounted by a smallish 
and admirable clock-tower ; but although it stands in 
the midst of towering new buildings, among which are 
not only the Woolworth but the immense and lofty 
new Municipal Building, this little old City Hall, so 
graceful, so self-possessed, with so fine an air of re- 
pose, of distinction, does not seem small. Indeed, it 
seems to dominate! It is a little Napoleon among 
giant marshals. 

60 



ABOUND CITY HALL PAEK 

The center of the building is recessed, with two pro- 
jecting wings. Throughout, it is the knowledge and 
use of proper proportions that give the building its 
fineness of look. There is more than the usual num- 
ber of w^indows along the front, thus adding to the 
aspect of airy lightness. In front of the broad stone 
steps that lead up to the low-pillared entrance, the 
sidewalk bends broadly outward in a generous bow, 
and, slightly terraced, adds to the general effective- 
ness. 

Inside, the admirable stone stairway, a double stair, 
sweeping upward within the rotunda, is a marvelous 
achievement of grace and beauty. The encircling pil- 
lars at the head of the stairs are of much dignity. 
The Governor's Eoom — so called from the intention 
that this should always be a headquarters ready for 
the Governor of the State, whenever he should visit 
the metropolis— is really a suite of three connecting 
rooms which keep up the old-time atmosphere of fine 
stateliness. Maintained as a memento of the past, 
the Governor's Eoom is beautiful in its paneling and 
cornices and ceilings, its fireplaces, the portraits of 
distinguished men that line its walls, and its fine old 
furniture. The room has a soft beauty of coloring, 
from the white of the woodwork, the varied colors of 
the paintings, the mahogany furniture, the oak floor ; 
and of all of the coloring, the buff and blue of Trum- 
bull's Washington is most delightful. 

This portrait of Washington was painted in 1790, 
at the special request of the city authorities, who for- 
mally asked Washington to ''permit Mr. Trumbull to 

61 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

take his portrait to be placed in the City Hall as a 
monument to the respect which the inhabitants of this 
city have toward him"; the City Hall of that time 
being the building on Wall Street. 

This began a very pleasant custom on the part of 
the city to obtain for its City Hall the portraits of 
leading men, and especially men of this State, and the 
custom was kept up for some seventy-five years. 
(Ancient Florence began a similar custom, and in- 
stead of wearying with seventy-five years kept it up 
for centuries!) 

Washington is represented as standing beside his 
gray horse, with one hand on the pommel of the saddle. 
It is a quiet but spirited portrait, and Washington 
looks every inch a leader, in his coat of blue, his 
breeches and waistcoat of buff, his high black boots. 
The background represents the view and the walk 
which he personally loved, for it is New York Bay and 
the hills of Staten Island, as seen from the walk along 
the Battery. 

Among the other portraits is that of Seward as 
governor, twenty years before the Civil War, a slen- 
der, youngish, dapper, tight-buttoned man, painted by 
Inman ; and also an Inman is that of the distinguished 
New Yorker, Van Buren, with red hair and red side- 
whiskers and his hand on a tablecloth of dull crimson ; 
not at all the Van Buren of the imagination ! For this 
is a retiring sort of man, lacking altogether in the ex- 
pected aggressiveness of the chosen protege of the 
fiery Jackson. 

Here is Alexander Hamilton, painted by Trumbull ; 

62 



AROUND CITY HALL PARK 

a good-looking man, a little thin-lipped, with pow- 
dered hair and white stock. It takes away from the 
value of this portrait that it was not painted from 
life, but one year after Hamilton's death; but it no 
doubt correctly represents his long nose, his thin lips, 
his fingers a little too slender. Here is DeWitt Clin- 
ton who, the son of a distinguished father, won dis- 
tinction even greater than that of his father. He is a 
stoutish man with an alert and distinctly modern face. 
The portrait was painted by that Catlin who was one 
of the earliest travelers among the Indians of the 
West and a painter of Indian scenes. 

Among the others is a Hudson that need not seri- 
ously be considered, and also a Stuyvesant about 
which very little is known; but there is a really ex- 
cellent bust of Henry Clay, made by Pruden, in 1849. 
And there is a portrait of Oliver Hazard Perry — com- 
monly referred to as ''Commodore," but to whom a 
grateful government never gave a higher title than 
Captain, and even that not until after the Battle of 
Lake Erie. This painting was made at the request 
of the city, in 1816, very shortly after his victory; it 
is by Jarvis, and it shows the gallant young Perry in 
an open boat, bareheaded, in blue coat and white 
waistcoat and trousers, with sailors beside him in 
striped woolen sweaters and beaver hats of the shape 
of the silk hats of today ; this scene representing him 
in the act of changing from his sinking flagship to 
another ship, to continue the fight. 

It is one of the pleasant things about New York 
that it has always loved to do honor to naval heroes. 

63 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK 

Kecently it was Dewey; long ago Hull and Decatur 
were honored here, and were formally received at the 
City Hall ; and Oliver Hazard Perry was also one of 
the naval men to whom New York gave a special pub- 
lic welcome, in addition to securing his portrait. 

The old-time furniture here is fascinating. There 
is a beautiful great desk, a Sheraton of unusual 
length and design, flat-topped, with drawers at either 
end as well as at each side, the desk which Washing- 
ton, as President, personally used here in New York 
City. There are also desks that were personally 
used by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton; and 
there are chairs and tables and settees, made for the 
first furnishing of the former Federal Hall. 

John McComb, a Scotchman, was the reputed archi- 
tect of the City Hall, but there is some reason for 
thinking that the perfection of the design was largely 
owing to an assistant; a Frenchman. It should be 
remembered, however, that the best architectural 
work of the then recent years had been by Scotchmen, 
the family of Adam, that they had published their 
designs, and that this building shows marked Adam 
characteristics. 

McComb himself furnished the stone and did the 
stone work, and under him, for the woodwork, was a 
man named Weeks, who had a brother who was 
charged with having murdered a girl to whom he was 
engaged. Hamilton and Burr, who at that time had 
not become enemies, were united in the defense of 
Weeks, and the Judge, Lansing, practically ordered 
the jury to acquit. 

64 



AEOUND CITY HALL PAEK 

The girl's aunt, shaking with passionate grief, cried 
openly in the court room that there would be no jus- 
tice in Heaven if those who had set free the slayer of 
her niece should die unpunished. And old New York- 
ers used to point out, with awe, that Hamilton was 
shot ; that Burr, a disgraced wanderer, crept disgraced 
to death; that Lansing, rising to be chief justice, 
stepped out of his ofiSce in New York, one day in 1829, 
and quite vanished out of existence, in absolute and 
mysterious disappearance. 

In front of the City Hall stands one of the most dis- 
tinguished works of art in New York, a bronze statue, 
by MacMcnnies, of Nathan Hale, the schoolmaster cap- 
tain who volmiteered to act as a spy to obtain informa- 
tion of which Washington was vitally in need. The 
statue, with a brave pathos in its pose, bears upon 
the base Hale's noble last words that his only regret 
was that he had but one life to give for his country. 

By an incomprehensible blunder, the statement is 
also inscribed on the base that Hale was "a captain 
in the regular army of the United States," although 
the United States did not even exist until years after 
his death. He was hurriedly hanged, after the fare- 
well messages which he had written to his mother and 
to the girl he was to have married were burned before 
his eyes. The face, of gentle manliness, is but an 
ideal, as there was no portrait to follow: nor was 
Hale executed where his statue stands, but at some 
spot, vaguely identified as being on the Beekman 
property, beside the East River. 

Within scarcely more than a stone's throw, how- 

65 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

ever, from this statue there was long ago a hanging 
in New York City which, like that of Hale, was en- 
tirely without dishonor to the man upon whom sen- 
tence was inflicted. 

Following the overturning of the English govern- 
ment by William and Mary, a committee of safety 
met, in New York, to appoint a governor to take the 
place of the governor who had been appointed under 
the Stuart regime, whereupon a merchant named 
Jacob Leisler was chosen, and he acted as governor 
from 1689 to 1691, holding the office with dignity, and 
ready at any time to turn over his powers to a duly 
accredited successor. 

It was Leisler who, as acting governor, summoned 
the first Congress of the Colonies to meet ! He called 
the meeting together at the old State House in Coen- 
ties Slip, in 1690, and representatives were there from 
New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, 
which was then under a separate government, and 
Maryland. New Jersey sent its ''sympathies" in- 
stead of representatives; and the Quakers of Penn- 
sylvania sent word that it was ''ag't their princ's to 
fight." This Congress voted to raise an army of 
eight hundred and fifty men to invade Canada and 
wipe out the French, but it is not recorded that the 
French were wiped out at that time. 

Leisler 's career was tragically ended. A man 
with the suggestive name of Sloughter came over, 
appointed as governor, and although Leisler made no 
opposition whatever when the proper credentials 
were shown him, he was put under arrest, treated 

66 



AROUND CITY HALL PARK 

with the greatest harshness, and sentenced to death, 
in spite of his pitiful amazement that he was to be 
slain by William for holding the Colony against 
Stnart sympathizers! He and his son-in-law were 
hanged, under accompanying circumstances of great 
cruelty, in a drenching rain, in the Leisler garden, 
close to the edge of what is now City Hall Park. 

The stigma of disloyalty was afterwards formally 
removed, and Frankfort and Jacob Streets bear in 
mind the unfortunate man, for Jacob was his first 
name and Frankfort was the city of his birth. There 
is a street up near Mulberry Bend with the sweet old- 
fashioned name of Hester, but that district is now 
so far from being either sweet or old-fashioned that 
one does not think of even the name as a delightful 
one: but it was named for Hester, the daughter of 
Governor Leisler. 

The City Hall was completed in 1812; and, in the 
open space where it now stands, the Declaration of 
Independence was read to the gathered American 
troops, on July 9, 1776, in the presence of General 
Washington. 

Washington's first New York home, after he be- 
came President, was but a few minutes' walk from this 
spot, on Cherry Hill, at the corner of Cherry Street 
and the incredibly curving Pearl Street, on what is 
now known as Franklin Square. 

Cherry Hill, in early days, was a charming region, 
with cherry trees and greenery leading down to the 
sparkling river. But the Cherry Hill of to-day is 
one of the disreputable-looking tenement districts of 

67 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

the city, with houses of different heights standing at 
irregular angles with the sidewalks, and threatening 
dark passageways leading to dingier and darker tene- 
ments in the rear. From the huge bridge, the orig- 
inal Brooklyn Bridge, far overhead, comes the dis- 
tant rumble of traffic. At the upper end of the slope 
stands a huge abutment, darkly massive, and on that 
very spot stood the Presidential mansion. 

The progress of New York since early days is 
splendidly marked by its bridges. To say that they 
are the greatest bridges in the world is but a small 
statement, for nowhere else in the world are there 
bridges even to be compared with them. 

The original Brooklyn Bridge, over a mile in 
length, is still fondly known by that distinctive name, 
and its beautifully sweeping curve still gives it the 
supremacy in looks. Close above is the Manhattan 
Bridge ; then comes the Williamsburg Bridge, with its 
length of over a thousand feet more than the first of 
these bridges, and of 7,200 feet in all. Next up the 
East River is the huge Queensboro, fourteen hundred 
feet longer than the Williamsburg, and with a 
mighty length of 8601 feet in all. And last of all is 
the tremendous Hell Gate Bridge, leading from East 
141st Street to Astoria. 

Different from the other bridges is this Hell Gate 
Bridge. For the others are for trolley cars and foot 
passengers, for wagons and automobiles, but the Hell 
Gate is a railroad bridge, making, with its huge bulk, 
the connecting link which for the first time permits, 
in connection with the tunnels, through trains to run 

68 



AROUND CITY HALL PAEK 

without ferriage from the South, through New York 
City, on to New England. 

Stupendous, marvelous — no words can be too 
strong for these achievements : and by far the great- 
est praise and the greatest credit belong to the mem- 
ory of the engineer, Roebling, who first saw how to 
span this great width of water, and who made the 
plans for Brooklyn Bridge and got the work in suc- 
cessful motion — and then died before the bridge could 
be completed. Work was begun in 1870: the bridge 
was opened for traffic in 1883: and I like to believe 
the story, which bears the marks of poetical truth, 
that Roebling, dying, and unable to leave his room, 
had himself, day by day, placed at the window, whence 
he could see, in the distance, the lofty towers, and the 
great bridge curving toward completion. 





CHAPTER VI 

* * MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN ' ' 

"ALT WHITMAN never 
wearied of coming phras- 
es to express his admira- 
tion of New York, such 
as: ''Superb-faced Man- 
hattan"; ''City of the 
World! City of tall fa- 
gades of marble and 
iron!" "Mettlesome, 
mad, extravagant city ! ' ' 
"When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to 
her pavement ' ' ; and, naturally, ' ' My city ! ' ' 

The thrill, the life, the movement, the strength, of 
the city — how they stand for the most representative 
Americanism! And foreign visitors are much im- 
pressed by these aspects of Americanism : as, for ex- 
ample, Thackeray, who writes: "Broadway has a 
rush of life such as I have never seen : the rush and 
restlessness please me. ' ' Rudyard Kipling, however, 
was frankly jarred by this kind of Americanism, at 
least on his first visit. Busy streets, and huge busi- 
ness structures, frankly wearied him, and, as he has 
never been in the habit of mincing his words, he pub- 

70 



'^ MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" 

lished his irritable belief that Americans were "bar- 
barians" and "heathens." However, the barbarians 
and heathens forgave him, and all America watched 
and waited with eager sympathy when he lay in New 
York, at the threshold of death, in the late '90 's. Kip- 
ling came to know New York very well: and I have 
wondered whether, with his love for the picaresque 
and unusual, he ever knew, in regard to a hotel that 
was one of his favorites, that the brother of the pro- 
prietor was said to be a professional thief and swin- 
dler whose frequent address was the penitentiary, and 
that the hotel itself, highly respectable and prosper- 
ous, had been built, so it was said, with the ill-earned 
money from the brother who, for cogent reasons, was 
unable, himself, to spend much time there ! 

A human tide comes flowing into the business por- 
tion of New York every morning; it fills the canyon 
gorge of Broadway, it goes rushing in currents into 
the side streets and offshoots, it is sucked into the 
great stores and the office buildings. Then, in the aft- 
ernoon, the tide turns. The human stream comes 
pouring out of the buildings, rushing from street after 
street, swirling into the subways, moving in swift cur- 
rents toward ferries and elevated trains, rushing to- 
ward the great bridges. And no feature of this gen- 
eral scene is more impressive than the black-coated, 
black-skirted streams moving in unbroken currents, 
across the squares and across the avenues, eastward 
into the tenement districts. 

In general character, the lower part of the city on 
the West Side is different from that on the East : the 

71 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

streets are broader, the houses are lower, there are 
far more individual homes remaining, with concomi- 
tantly fewer tenements, there is many a charming old 
doorway, many an oval window, there are wrought- 
iron newels with pineapples or classic urns ; and here 
the population is still largely American or Irish- 
American. 

Far down on the lower West Side, on Varick Street, 
at St. John's Park, is St. John's Chapel, which was 
considered so far uptown when it was built that it was 
wondered who could possibly be expected to attend it, 
but which is now so far downtown that church-goers 
never get to it. Trinity Church, owning a great deal 
of land in this vicinity, and wishing in consequence to 
draw wealthy homes here, built for this reason, St. 
John's, completed in 1807. 

At the time it was built, it faced out over a space 
free of houses towards the Hudson, and was known as 
St. John's-in-the-Field. Within the park which was 
laid out within a few years after the building of the 
church grew fine big trees, and this park space was 
enclosed, as Gramercy Park still is, within an iron 
fence with a locked gate, whose keys were given to 
owners of the new houses facing the park, as they were 
built. They were fine houses that gradually arose 
there, but most of them were torn down and replaced 
by business structures many and many a year ago. 
But, before the coming of business, the entire centre 
of the park, which was to have remained a delightful 
open space forever, was acquired by the New York 
Central Railway, which covered every portion of the 

72 



''MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN'^ 

park area, over half a century ago, with a huge un- 
sightly freight station, thus not only ruining the 
neighborhood for homes, but blotting the park itself 
entirely out of existence: for always there are men 
who can carry out ruthless plans. I remember meet- 
ing an old gentleman, an old-time resident of the park, 
who told what a poignant tragedy to him and to others 
was the felling of the trees. 

Old St. John's, now black with age, is of stately 
porticoed design, with great pillars, and its fine tower 
dimmishingly rises in pilastered squares and columned 
circles. Its interior is stately and dignified, with fine 
columns, and tall square pilastered corners at the 
front of the chancel, and a curving stairway to the 
pulpit. 

I say that all this ''is," but even as I write the 
stately old building may be destroyed. In front of it 
a new subway has undermined the very portico, and 
on either side are wreckage and desolation. Even 
before the recent additional changes of the vicinity 
began to be made. Trinity was on the point of giving 
up this chapel, and by the time this is published the 
buildmg may, not improbably, be demolished. It won 
so many friends by its dignified beauty, that it has 
been permitted to remain long after its practical use- 
fulness disappeared. 

The last time that I was there, one day as the after- 
noon shadows were gently stretching across the shad- 
o^vy interior, it was not a time for service, but the 
organist was softly practising, and I was the only one 
m the church. Sweet and pleasant was the effect, de- 

73 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

liglitful was the fiiie dignity of it all and the softly 
echoing music— and then, at the very door, came a 
succession of crashing detonations from the blasting 
work. 

It is a pleasant thing to remember in connection 
with this old church that here there is still given out, 
on Saturday mornings, a free weekly dole of sixty- 
seven loaves of wheaten bread in compliance with the 
will of a certain John Leake, w^ho died in 1792, leav- 
ing money whose income should always be thus de- 
voted to feeding the poor. Delightfully remindful, 
this, that New York is really an old city ; for nothing 
is pleasanter than ancient pleasant customs, graceful 
charities which are to go on forever, like the dole of 
bread and ale that has been given out for centuries 
at charming old Winchester, in England. And, as to 
the continued permanence of the dole of old St. John's, 
a man in charge of the building said to me, with fretful 
resignation, as of submission, but with frank unwil- 
lingness, to the inevitable : ' ' We can 't stop givin ' it : 
it's lor: the lor won't let us"! 

St. John's Park has a curious connection with the 
tragedy of the Blennerhassetts, who lived so romanti- 
cally on the Ohio, and who were ruined through their 
connection with Aaron Burr: for their son, helpless 
and an object of charity, lingered on till 1854, and 
shortly before his death was visited by James Parton, 
the historian, bearing a contribution from a number 
of sympathizers, and Parton tells of finding him in a 
miserable room near St. John's Park, an elderly man, 
shabbily dressed, with a pallid, expressionless face. 

74 



''MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" 

The graveyard of St. John's was at some blocks to 
the northward, on Hudson Street, and it was a roman- 
tic looking place, which a few years ago was turned 
into a children's plaj^ground and a sunken Italian 
garden and named Hudson Park. One of the old mon- 
uments is still preserved there; a firemen's monument 
ornamented with stone helmets and firemen's trump- 
ets. A row of old-time houses, admirably preserved, 
looks into the park ; "St. Luke 's Place, ' ' this used to 
be called, and long ago these were homes of prosper- 
ous sea-captains. 

St. John's Graveyard well deserves to be remem- 
bered, for, so the tradition has come down, it was 
through walking back and forth among its stones that 
the idea of the ''Raven" came to Edgar Allan Poe. 

A few minutes ' walk from here, just away from the 
lower end of Sixth Avenue, is a little section centered 
in Minetta Street and Minetta Lane, Vv^hich is the 
wretchedest part of the city in outward appearance : 
it is a center for poor-looking negroes, and some 
poorer whites, and the tiny area is a nest of narrowest 
streets, scarcely more than alleys, with unexpected 
crooks and twists. The houses are tumbledown and 
old, and originally were picturesque, with dormered 
roofs, with hips and gables, with their front steps of 
stone leading up sidewise to pillared doorways, and 
with many of the houses set, with no apparent reason, 
at delightfully odd and differing angles. 

Italians are thick-crowding up to this region, and 
near by, on Bleecker Street, is an Italian Church, that 
of Madonna di Pompei, with pillared front and Italian 

75 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

campanile. The church looks unexpectedly old, con- 
sidering that the Italians have come here within but 
a few years— and you find that the dignified pillared 
front is really old, and that it is the recent successful 
addition of the slim campanile which gives the Itahan 
aspect to the entire structure ! 

Broadway is not far away: wherever you are, in 
Manhattan, Broadway seems readily reachable: and 
not far from straight across from here, and about as 
far east of Broadway as this is west, is an interesting 
church of another type. It is old St. Patrick's, a dull- 
gray plastered building, built over a hundred years 
ago, and for years it was the Eoman Catholic Cathe- 
dral of the city. It was surrounded at first by an 
American population, then by the Irish, and now by 
the Italians who pack solidly the tenements round 
about ; so solidly, that there are seven thousand chil- 
dren of school-age within the radius of a quarter of a 
mile. It faces on Mott Street and runs back to Mul- 
berry, with its side towards Prince. 

Within the church is buried thaf Boss" Kelly who 
'long ruled Tammany with an iron and honest hand. 
Here, too, lies that Delmonico, founder of the line, who 
achieved world-wide fame through catering in things 
gastronomic and costly. And then comes a sudden 
thrill ; for, walking through the high-walled graveyard 
beside the church, one is suddenly back in the Revolu- 
tion, suddenly one hears, in fancy, the thunder of can- 
non, and sees Paul Jones, off Flamborough Head, 
dashing splendidly on the British in the ''Bon Homme 
Richard," one sees, in swift fancy, the Frenchman, 

76 



''MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" 

Pierre Landais, in his own much larger battleship, not 
helping Paul Jones, but holding off and, whether by 
accident or design, actually broadsiding the Ameri- 
can's boat. For here is the grave of poor Landais; 
and, according to the old inscrijDtion, he was ' ' ancien 
Contre-Amiral au service des Etats Unis, qui dispar- 
uit June, 1818, age 87 ans." 

And there comes not only the memory of that day 
of glory for Paul Jones and of disgrace for Landais, 
but the thought of the lonely suffering of the long 
years that followed, here in New York, for the French- 
man. He was tried by a naval committee, none of 
whom understood French, he himself at the time un- 
derstanding scarcely a word of English, and was dis- 
missed from the American service in disgrace. Again 
and again he sought in vain for a rehearing, and for 
forty weary years walked the streets of New York in 
proud and solitary poverty, now and then donning his 
old Continental uniform on some great national occa- 
sion, but always looked at by the people askance ; and 
at length it was here, in old St. Patrick's churchyard, 
that the saddened and friendless man found rest. 

The churches of New York add greatly, not only to 
the interest of the city, but to its looks : and none have 
a more striking situation than the beautiful structure 
at Broadway and Tenth Street. It is Grace Church, 
and it can be seen from far down Broadway, for it 
stands where the great thoroughfare makes a sweep- 
ing bend, and it is a beautifully spired, and inspired, 
mass of white stone, with the effect, from a distance, 
of rising in the very middle of the street. 

77 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK 

It is a fine structure, with a sweetly gracious air; 
it is not a perched church, but sits close to the ground, 
with its gardens and greenery and shrubs nestled 
around it, and with its door opening in welcome from 
the sidewalk. It is amazing to see this broad open 
greenery on either side of the church and fronting the 
recessed rectory and tributary church buildings, in 
this busy part of Broadway. And on the grass is a 
huge dolium, a curiosity-awakenmg jar, brought here 
from across the ocean as if to prove the truth of tne 
"Arabian-Nights" and its tale of Ali Baba and the 
forty thieves who hid in jars ! 

On the southern wall of the church, and a curious 
thing to find in America, is an outside pulpit of stone, 
remindful of the outside pulpit behind the delightful 
cathedral of Tours. This pulpit looks over an open 
sjoace toward where, for years, night after night, there 
gathered the drearily pathetic and world-famous 
bread line, which disappeared with the passing of the 
kind-hearted Austrian's bakery and coffee-house from 
that corner. 

The front view of Grace Church, the iron fence, the 
hedge, the greenery, make a scene which became, on 
the stage, the best known piece of scene painting in 
America ; for this was made the setting for one of the 
acts in the ' ' Old Homestead, ' ' a play which was played 
for so many years, and which became over and over 
again familiar in every part of the country. The 
chimes, too, which were always rung when this scene 
was presented on the stage, were remindful of the 
chimes of this church, which, sounding so often and so 

78 



'^MILLION-FOOTED MANHATTAN" 

sweetly over the throngs of Broadway, seem among 
the sweetest chimes in the world. 

The interior of the church well carries out the in- 
terest of the exterior, with its stone pillars, the quiet 
coloring of the glass behind the altar, the admirable 
smaller rose-window, and the general air of repose. 

There never will be anything more dramatic than a 
certain funeral procession, in New York, and what led 
up to it; and I speak of it here because I saw the 
funeral when it was passing Grace Church. The 
setting of the dramatic story was in the romantic 
period of the world — which is only to say that any 
period possesses romance, and that it only needs to be 
recognized when it comes. 

Henry George, the Single Taxer, one of the striking 
figures in Amierican life, was running for the office of 
mayor of New York in a fiercely contested campaign, 
the first mayoralty campaign of the Greater City, in 
1897. Almost on the eve of election he died, and there 
was widespread grief. His body lay in state and a 
hundred thousand people solemnly passed by. At the 
funeral services there were addresses by a Eoman 
Catholic priest, a Congregational minister, a Hebrew 
Rabbi, and others ; to such varied minds had his teach- 
ing and personality appealed. 

As evening came on, the funeral procession moved. 
Down Broadway it came, on its way to Brooklyn and 
Greenwood, and profoundly impressive was the sight 
as the cortege swung around the bend of Broadway at 
Grace Church. Although but early evening, it was 
dark. Lights and shadows seemed mysteriously 

79 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

blended. The heaviest bell of the church was slowly 
tolling and the tolling was sad and drear and of tre- 
mendous solemnity. The body of the dead man was 
borne high on a lofty open catafalque, which was all 
black, and the coffin shook and rocked as the wheels 
jolted over the roughness of the pavement. Alone, in 
front, with head and shoulders drooping, rode a man 
on horseback, the chief mourner and closest friend, 
Tom Johnson, himself a figure of national importance, 
but now likewise gone. Behind, came lifers playing 
the saddening notes of "Flee as a bird to the moun- 
tain"; and behind these, marching solemnly between 
the black and deserted fronts of the business houses 
and past this church, there followed thousands upon 
thousands of men on foot. It made a picture of tre- 
mendous intensity. 



iiw 





80 



CHAPTER VII 



UP THE BOWERY 




EW YORK is one of the cities 
that have popular songs writ- 
ten about them; and perhaps 
none of its songs won such 
widespread popularity as the 
one that goes so swingingly 
with its: 

"The Bowery, the Bowery, 
They do such things, and they say 

such things. 
On the Bowery, the Bowery — 
I '11 never go there any more ! ' ' 

But of course what it meant was, that everybody 
would want to hurry right back there; whereupon 
it behooved the Bowery to do such things and to say 
such things as would give it the air of living up to its 
swaggering and swashbuckling reputation, with even 
more than a touch of the desperately dissipated and 
criminal. 

But, as a show, on the basis of such anticipations, 
the Bowery does not look the part! It is an ex- 
tremely broad street, with a line of elevated tracks 
along either side and an unusual number of trolley 

81 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

tracks down the middle. It has quite a proportion 
of saloons, it is markedly a street of big cheap lodg- 
ing houses for men, there are restaurants and pawn- 
shops, and there are many stores, mostly smallish 
ones; it looks like a busy respectable street, and 
that it even has banks, gives it, surely, the final re- 
spectable touch. Even the men and women who 
throng its sidewalks are disappointingly respectable 
in looks! 

The wicked glories of the Bowery of the past, 
partly real and partly imaginary as they were, have 
gone, and the wickedness of to-day, when you come 
to look into it, is not glamorous. Wickedness, to 
be attractive, seems to need the haze of distant time. 
It is hard to feel pleasantly thrilled over "Suicide 
Hall," and ''Nigger Mike's," and ''The Bucket of 
Blood," even though their claims to fame have been 
eagerly pushed. It is hard to feel keen interest in 
Sloppy Mag Unsky or Tinky-Tin Cushman, or even 
in the man who set the example of bridge-jumping, 
and on the strength of this set up a prosperous 
saloon. However, people and places are here, and 
some friendly policeman or guide, or perhaps the 
megaphone man of a sightseeing car, will point them 
out. 

The fame of the Bowery of the past — romanti- 
cally evil, as it was in the past — came largely from the 
evil neighborhood and haunts of the Five Points and 
Mulberry Bend: but a great public park has there 
taken the place of the tenements inhabited by the 
lowest criminals, and busy Italians have since 



UP THE BOWERY 

thronged into possession of the present bordering 
tenements, and the Chinese quietly hold their own 
circumscribed district, a patient and on the whole a 
law-abiding folk. But one relic of the past does still 
remain there, and it is a joy! The ''pullers-in" of 
Baxter Street are still there! — the second-hand 
clothing spiders who seize the passing man of un- 
wariness and, dragging him indoors, outfit him in 
raiment of which it can be justly said that Solomon 
in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
And it is proper to refer to Solomon, for the 
men of these dark little clothing shops are of his 
race. 

But this extremely successful race are more in evi- 
dence in New York than merely on little Baxter 
Street! To say that there are more Hebrews in 
New York than in Jerusalem would be to put it mildly. 
There are more here than there are in any other city 
of the world. They occupy great sections in the Man- 
hattan tenement district, they have a mighty Ghetto 
far over in that part of Brooklyn known as Browns- 
ville. On Broadway, one sees few business signs ex- 
cept those with Hebrew names. Not only are there 
synagogues for the poor, but there are also those 
for the wealthy, as notably the one opposite lower 
Central Park, on Fifth Avenue. Not only in business 
but in real estate have they won prominence, for it 
is stated, by real estate men, that Hebrews own sixty- 
five per cent, of the land of Manhattan. And, as a 
race, they independently aim to take care of their own 
charities, and a much smaller proportion than those of 

83 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

other races get their names into the records of the 
criminal courts. 

On Center Street, not far from Mulberry Bend, is 
the great pile of buildings of the Criminal Courts 
and the Tombs. The famous original Tombs Prison, 
however, with its Egyptian-like front, has been re- 
placed by a modern structure on the same spot, but 
still the Venetian-like Bridge of Sighs connects the 
courts and the prison, and over it the prisoners pass 
to be tried, and return across it if convicted. 

The grim trials known to evil fame and eagerly dis- 
cussed throughout the entire country, have been many : 
vastly more have been those unnoticed ones which 
meant, in their outcome, just as much to the individual 
as if millions of people were every morning looking 
at their newspapers to see how the case was going. 

Frequently, a jury is ready to report at night ; and 
when this is expected, and the judge is in a good 
humor, he will wait patiently as the hours creep 
slowly by — slowly for the prisoner, at least, but not 
always so for the others interested, for I have seen 
the judge and the lawyers on both sides, with news- 
paper men and perhaps some interested witnesses, ad- 
journ to one of the near places of refreshment, and 
gaily talk and banter, while, if they cared to think of 
it, and if any good could be done by thinking of it, 
they would realize that the prisoner was frantically 
waiting. 

At length a bailiff would come in with a whispering 
word. All would straggle back to the dimly lighted 
courtroom, where shadows were hiding in all the cor- 

84 



UP THE BOWEEY 

ners and there would be a hnrrying "Hear ye, hear 
ye ! " and the jury would file soberly in, and the pris- 
oner would stand to face them. 

The "Bowery" is an odd misnomer. For it is a 
Dutch word, pronounced but not spelled this way, and 
it means a pleasant suburban home mth a garden. 
Governor Petrus Stuyvesant had his Bowery, some 
two and a half miles north of the Battery, and to the 
road which, for the northern half of the distance, led 
to it, was given its name — the Bowery. 

The gallant General Knox rode down the Bowery 
at the head of the first detachment of the American 
army on November 25, 1783, on his way to the Battery, 
to take possession of the city after the evacuation by 
the British: he having been chosen for the proud 
honor by Washington, who followed him a little later, 
and met him, on his return, here on the Bowery, at 
what was to be its junction with Canal Street. 

At the upper end of the Bowery is the Bible House, 
with its output of over seven millions of Bibles a year, 
and at the southern end is dark little Chatham Square, 
covered with elevated tracks and station — and I re- 
member a modern little sign there, eminently suggest- 
ive, at the foot of a black little stair, reading "Black 
Eyes Painted." 

Just off the lower side of Chatham Square, on a 
little, old and very dismal street which has incongru- 
ously been given the name of the New Bowery, is the 
earliest Jewish graveyard in the city, dating far back 
to 1656. It is one of the loneliest, one of the gloomi- 
est places imaginable, and I never see it without 

85 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

thinking of the sad little London burying-ground 
where ended the tragedy of the mistress of Bleak 
House. This ancient Jewish cemetery is tiny in size, 
it stands a little above the present level of the side- 
walk, and fronts gloomily out beneath the Elevated 
tracks which fill the narrow gloomy street. 

Those first Jews in Xew York were Spanish and 
Portuguese, and their records and tombstones were 
inscribed in Spanish, and their rabbis had romantic 
names such as Pinto, Seixas and Peixotto. 

Cats now prowl dismally among the time-blackened 
stones, and the windows of dilapidated tenements look 
down upon them; and from one of these windows, a 
third-floor one at 26 James Street; nearly a century 
ago — the quarter being then somewhat better than at 
present — little Joe Jefferson, afterwards to be Rip 
Van Winkle, used to look down into this strange, 
lonely God's Acre. 

Most marked of any of the outward changes in 
the appearance of the Bowery is that which has 
come with the tearing down of buildings to make the 
plaza and approach, at Canal Street, for the great 
Manhattan Bridge. The result is superbly beautiful: 
great space has been taken for it, and the work has 
been done with strength of conception and architect- 
ural impressiveness. 

The old Bowery Theatre, full of interesting theat- 
rical memories, and known for some years past as the 
Thalia, looks across the Bowery at this sweeping 
change: and the old theatre itself is doomed shortly 
to disappear, to be replaced by a modern business 

86 



UP THE BOWERY 

structure of a kind befitting tlie changed looks of the 
neighborhood. 

It is well worth while to take a trolley car and cross 
Manhattan Bridge in the early evening, even if only 
to come back from its farther end, for it rises over the 
very roofs of block after block of tenements, and you 
look far down into streets that look like narrow slits, 
and down at lighted windows and busy streets and 
moving throngs. 

And the impression comes of endless cars, in long 
twinkling lines, flitting over endlessly on the Wil- 
liamsburg Bridge above and the old Brooklyn Bridge 
a little farther do^m; and it is all w^onderfuUy im- 
pressive and tells vividly of the great surging life of 
the great city. 

Walk slowly up the Bowery, and you are pleased 
mth the gregarious life and happiness of it all. Peo- 
ple are bustling, crowding, thronging, but all are quiet 
and orderly. Seldom is any one boisterous or drunk. 
The policemen, so quiet and capable, are just quietly 
looking on, ready to help or to answer questions. An 
old man with two heavy valises gets dazedly off a car, 
looks dazedly about, is lost. Instantly a policeman 
is beside him, genially and capably helping him, put- 
ting confidence into him, directing him. Not always 
the wicked Bowery of tradition, one realizes. 

At the end of the Bowery, at a cobweb centre of 
streets, rises the shapeless bulk of Cooper Union. It 
was founded long ago by Peter Cooper and has done 
great good through its many and varied classes, its 
generous aid to those who are struggling and ambi- 

87 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

tious. For use in coiinoetion with the work of the 
School of Design, a notable collection has been gath- 
ered of the line old furniture of early days, and there 
are also admirable details of early woodwork and 
metal work. 

The great reading room of Cooper Union, with its 
myriad of newspapers from myriad cities, is one of 
tlie sights of Xew York, crowded as it is with the 
homeless and the homesick, and with strangers eager 
to read the news from their home-towns. 

The meeting hall on the lower floor has long been a 
place for men of advanced ideas, or at least of ideas 
different from those currently received — the two 
things not being at all necessarily the same! The 
listeners are likely to be of the class often referred to 
as the *' half-baked " : blind gropers after a knowledge 
that has been denied them; and, looking in at some 
meeting there, you will notice the tense eager look, the 
look of mental hunger, on the faces of those who crowd 
the front rows. 

It is a hall that is also associated with important 
movements. Although itself without dignity of as- 
pect, there have been famous meetings here, most not- 
able being the one addressed by Abraham Lincoln 
shortly before his nomination for the Presidency, when 
he was an unkno^^Ti figTire looming like a nightmare to 
the well-tailored East. One who heard him has told 
me of the solemn and immense effect of his great 
speech; of how he began haltingly, even awkwardly, 
but of how he gathered strength and ease, and went 
magnificently on. 

88 



UP THE EOTVERY 

Bnt when the meeting was over Lincoln was still 
bnt a nightmare. He was not yet a prophet. He 
wa5 not yet a leader, here in the East, away from his 
own region. All felt the impulse to draw away from 
this tall, gaunt, ill-dressed, earnest man— for earnest- 
ness always jars unless you are earnest yourself, and 
it always jars the smug, the satisfied, the complacent. 
One man, so the story runs, led Lincoln to a street 
car and put him aboard, saying that a youth, also 
boarding the car at that moment, would show him the 
way to his hotel; but within a few blocks the young 
man himself, ashamed of the tall companion who had 
been given him, slipped away, after murmuring that 
the car would go to the side entrance of the Astor 
House. 

And so, after a speech that was to arouse, in the 
reading of it, admiration and amazement, and which 
is memorable even to this day, the great Lincoln, de- 
serted and alone, was jolted slowly on, in a gloomy 
horse-car, to the side entrance of his hotel ! 

Two or three minutes ' walk from the northern end 
of the Bowery, is St. Mark's Church: '^St. Marks-in- 
the-Bowery," as it is still often called by old Xew 
Yorkers. 

''They say," and it used really to be believed by 
many and perhaps is even yet believed by some, that 
the ghost of old Petrus Stuyvesant still imperatively 
walks the aisles of this ancient church. Not that the 
church, old as it is— it was built in 1799— goes back so 
far as Stuyvesant 's own time, for he died over a cen- 
tury earlier than that, but that it stands on property 

89 



TUK r^OOK OK NKW YOKK 

that ho owiuni, and on iho ;sito ol' a ohapol that ho 
built, and that his tomb, with an insoriptiou ph\iuly 
to bo road from tho outsido of tho ohuroh. on ono of 
tlio fomidation stono;?. i$ bonoath tho tloor. oloso to 
tho oastorn sido. 

Tho original chapol \vas of oourso Dutch, and it was 
spociiioally givon by Stuyvosant's widow to tho Dutch 
Collogiato Church, which. howo\ or. doclinod to accept 
tho property, not fooling tho nood for it. and in 1793 
a groat-grandson of tho groat Potrus otYorod it to 
Trinity Corporation, and the property thus became 
Episcopalian, and the present church was built. 

It is a broad-fronted church, all in browns, situated 
in the midst of a green space at the junction of Second 
Avonuo and Stuyvesant Street. It stands sedately 
above the level of the sidewalk, with a broad open 
graveyard space on either side, and all about it are 
green grass and groat trees and shrubs, with singing 
birds and a general airy pleasantness, and Japanese 
ivy growing lush upon its walls. It is comfortable, it 
is pleasing and, in spite of being rather squat, it is 
highly pictorial. In fact, it is an exceedingly pictorial 
reminder of long-past time. The stone lions sitting 
inside of the portico of this extremely old-fashioned 
church seem oddly incongruous, but. after all. they 
achieve interest the moment one thinks of them as 
"Lions of St. Mark's." 

Tho church is now quite away from the homos of 
its natural congregation, but now and then it is filled 
to overflowing on some special occasion. But I re- 
member dropping in one week-day and linding the rec- 

90 



UP THE BOWERY 

tor going throtigh the fnll service with only one man 
in the large interior to make responses, and the or- 
ganist to play. Besides the one man there was, in- 
deed, a poor crif^jle, bnt he had only hmnbly crept in 
and sat very silent and very stiU and was obviously 
desirons to efface himself. At another time, when the 
church wa« also empty and when no service at aU 
was in progress, I noticed a lady there whom I knew 
to be the great-granddaughter of an old-time New 
York governor, a very great man in his day, whom 
they honored by burning near the stnrdy Stuyvesant ; 
she had slipped in with gentle inconspicuonsness, and 
somehow it seemed to give a sweet and charming con- 
nection between the vanished past and the present 
day, to see her kneeling where for generations her 
forebears had knelt. 

It is odd that Stuyi'esant shonld be so often called 
Peter. Assuredly, he did not call himself Peter, and 
I do not see why any one else should use the name. 
His name was Petrus, and it was often enough signed 
to Xew York decrees and ordinances to fix it perma- 
nently in the mind of the city. But there has been an 
odd, although quite unintentional revenge; for the 
Dutch, in the use of the name of Hudson, who was an 
Englishman of the plain English name of Henry, long 
ago gave him the Dutch form of Hendryck, and many 
English and Americans took this form from the Dntch, 
and in books and records, and even yet, and fre- 
quently, in conversation among Xew Yorkers, the 
name of Hendrjck Hudson is still absurdly re- 
ferred to. 

91 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

The interior of the church is notably broad, with a 
vaulted roof, with windows rich in new colored glass, 
with seven-branched candlesticks, with the Stations of 
the Cross upon the walls. 

The whimsical, irascible, tyrannical and highly hon- 
orable wooden-legged Petrus stumped through early 
New York so dominantly that he is still vaguely 
thought of as a sort of legendary good spirit of the 
city. He had fought in the European wars, and the 
wooden leg which came from one of the old battles, 
and which was often described as silver because it was 
silver-banded, and which threatened to put an end to 
his picturesque career, merely had the effect of send- 
ing him to win greater fame in America than ever 
would have been his in the long-forgotten campaigns 
of Germany and the Netherlands. 

That he was captain-general — good old name! — 
and governor-in-chief, and that, he died in 1682, at 
the age of eighty : this may be read on the outside face 
of the ancient tomb, there in the foundation of the 
present church. He was governor from 1647 to 1664, 
in which latter year there descended upon the colony 
an overwhelming English force. 

For a time, Stuyvesant would not consider surren- 
der. *'As touching your threats," he wrote to the 
English commander, 'Sve have nothing to answer, only 
that we fear nothing but what God, who is as just as 
He is merciful, may lay upon us. ' ' 

But surrender at length was needful, and, bitterly 
disappointed and chagrined, Stuyvesant retired to his 
*'bouwerie" here. 

92 



UP THE BOWERY 

His property extended from the East River as far 
as what is now known as Fourth Avenue, and an old 
pear tree that he set out at the corner of what is now 
Third Avenue and loth Street bore fruit for over two 
centuries, growing more and more ancient looking and 
gnarled and giving promise of another century or so 
of life, even though it stood in a circle within the side- 
walk area. But not very many years ago a careless 
driver ran a heavy truck against it and knocked it 
down, and that was the end of the ancient tree. The 
place where it stood is still marked, and policemen 
will tell you that visitors, and even New Yorkers, 
walking from curiosity over in this interesting sec- 
tion, will still ask to be shown the Stuyvesant pear 
tree, in the belief that it is still growing there. 

After the surrender of 1664, the disappointed Stuy- 
vesant went to Holland to explain in person the cir- 
cumstances of his unavoidable surrender of New Am- 
sterdam. It had intensely humiliated him; he felt 
that if he had been properly supported from Holland 
the surrender need not have been made ; and after his 
explanation he returned to his **bouwerie" in his be- 
loved New York, for the city was still warm in his 
affections in spite of the change in government and 
in name ; and it was on this trip that he brought with 
him the pear tree, then but a tiny little thing, the 
merest of saplings, and he planted it as a memorial by 
which, he said, he hoped to be remembered: grimly 
cynical, he thought that this tiny sapling would better 
preserve his fame than the seventeen years of gover- 
norship that had ended only in disaster. 

93 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

And all this sets the mind into the backward and 
abysm of time, for the career of Stuyvesant, who is so 
close to the New York of to-day that even the stories 
of his imperative ghost still linger, makes the city 
itself seem so old ! For he was a boy of seven years 
when Manhattan Island was seen by Hudson in 1609 : 
he was a lad of eleven when a few huts were put up 
here by Adrian Block in 1613 ; he was just entering on 
his twenties when the place was given what may be 
termed casual settlement, in 1624, by several families 
out of a shipload of Dutch who were really intended 
for the older settlement of Albany : and he had reached 
the age of twenty-four when, little suspecting that he 
himself was to go to Manhattan and be an important 
figure there, the place was formally settled by families 
intentionally taking their household goods to the spot. 
He was born when Henry of Navarre was King of 
France, when Elizabeth was Queen of England, in the 
year in which ''Hamlet" was written: he was made 
governor here by the Dutch, when England was un- 
der Cromwell: he died in the reign of Charles the 
Second. And yet it is customary to think of New 
York as a new city in a new country ! 

There is an admirable recent monument to Stuy- 
vesant, set close beside the porch of this church of St. 
Mark's-in-the-Bowery; a monument of broad-curving 
gray stone, surmounted by the bust of the irascible 
Petrus in bronze; but his body does not lie beneath 
this monument, but is within and below the inscribed 
foundation wall, over which ivy long ago began to 
clamber. 

94 



UP THE BOWERY 

Not only is Governor Stuyvesant buried here, but 
here too, and by the strangest of chances in the very 
same vault, is Governor Sloughter, the man who, as 
if changing *'o" to "a," unjustly had poor Governor 
Leisler killed, with the formalities of justice. Also 
here, but not in the same vault with those two early 
rulers who are so strangely set cheek by jowl, is that 
famous Governor Tompkms, who was long known as 
the war governor, because of his being the chief ex- 
ecutive of the State during the War of 1812, and who 
was also Vice-President of the United States. 

Old St. Mark's makes so harmonious a whole that it 
seems odd that, although the main building was 
erected from 1795 to 1799, the portico — which makes 
the church look like St. Martin 's-in-the-Fields, on 
Trafalgar Square — was actually not constructed until 
the uninspired time of 1858, and that the steeple of 
this so homogeneous structure was set up intermedi- 
ately, in 1829; and the calm preciseness of St. Mark's 
is vastly accentuated by the calm preciseness of this 
steeple, running up, as it does, in lessening squares, to 
a square-cornered and sharply pyramidal shaft, 
topped with a round gilt ball and a weather-vane. 

The home of Petrus, that he so loved, and to which 
he came back to live even though he must live under 
an alien government, stood near this old church, and 
here he ended his life in patriarchal dignity. 

Each year, on the anniversary of the day on which, 
as captain-general, he had fought and overcome the 
Swedes — how curious to know that there was ever 
such a conflict on American soil! — there was always 

95 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

a gala celebration on his place ; and as it was on April 
the First, Stuyvesant always saw to it that there were 
simple April First jests upon his ancient servants, 
negroes whom he had kept about him for years. 

Whenever Stuyvesant sat down, it was with his 
back to New York City, for its loss had caused him 
much bitterness: — but if his ghost should now sit 
down (and Scrooge thought that Marley's couldn't!) 
it would find it difficult to turn its back on New York ! 

When Stuyvesant died, it seemed as if every one in 
the colony, Dutch and English alike, came to the Bou- 
werie to follow his body in its short journey to the 
grave : and notable among the mourners in their piti- 
ful grief, were the gray-haired servants, his old 
negroes. 



■«» 







*- ^ /' }' • J .T^^■'^ 



v% 






^■iBilBM^- 




96 



CHAPTER VIII 



SOME CONTEASTS OF THE CITY 




HEN one thinks of the con- 
trasts of New York it seems 
as if it is peculiarly a city 
of contrasts, almost a city 
that is all contrast: what- 
ever you see, you may also 
see its opposite. 

No city shows quite such 
contrasts as that of the very 
richest men in the world and 
men of absolute poverty : the 
greatest philanthropists, the greatest givers of money 
in all the world, and the greatest criminals : no other 
city can show such a total of motor-cars and motor 
trucks as New York : yet there are countless numbers 
among the throngs on the sidewalks who have never 
ridden in a motor — there are no jitneys in New York 
— and within recent years a sight has become com- 
mon, in the best business sections, that used to be 
rare except in the tenement streets ; that of little carts 
piled high with merchandise and pushed by men. 

No other city in the world has so many and so 
varied types of humanity, and in such vast numbers. 

97 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

No other city shows such miles and miles of crowded 
life, and totals of massed humanity, yet in no other 
city is there so much of loneliness. The extent to 
which loneliness is prevalent is amazing. The number 
of rich and well-to-do and poor, not the homeless but 
those with homes, who know nobody, who have no 
callers and who never call, whose only social diver- 
sions are found in the theatres, the restaurants, the 
parks, the streets, is utterly amazing. 

The great stores of New York are the greatest in 
the world, as to cost of buildings, number of em- 
ployees, value of stock and volume of business, yet at 
the same time there are thousands of little, mussy, 
poorly equipped local shops, and many an attractive 
little shop as well. 

No part of the world is more busy, and at the same 
time more thronged, than the district of lower Broad- 
way and Wall Street and the wholesale district, dur- 
ing the day; and nowhere in the world is there a 
business district so deserted, so silent, so without 
life except for the solitary and infrequent policeman, 
as the mile after mile of this district at night. No- 
where in the world are there such lofty business 
structures and apartment houses, yet these are bor- 
dered and interspersed with buildings of ordinary 
height: there are two-story buildings that have held 
their own while business has mounted to the sky be- 
side them, and there are even vacant lots. There are 
the most expensive specialists, in medicine and sur- 
gery, and there are hospitals with the most expensive 

98 



SOME CONTRASTS OF THE CITY 

and modern equipment where surgical and medical 
aid is given free. 

There is the greatest and most reckless spending 
in the world, and there is the most pinching economy. 
You may stand beside some wealthy woman who 
negligently orders furs or gowns costing thousands, 
and in a few minutes may be in a shop where you 
will hear a poor child, who is buying a loaf of stale 
bread and a penny 's worth of cheese, say to the clerk, 
"Mother wants you to cut it with the ham knife to 
give it a hammy taste. ' ' 

While reckless spenders outdo one another in ex- 
pensiveness — and it was estimated just before the 
war that a million and a quarter of dollars was spent 
every evening in New York for dinners at the great 
hotels and restaurants — the careful savers have been 
daily increasing the immense totals in the savings 
banks. While the spending idlers, children of the 
wealthy, increasingly rival in number the wealthy 
young idlers that marked the life of London before 
the great war, the number is also increasing of those 
who toil and snip and baste and press and patch and 
sponge in sweat-shops wet and depressive with steam. 
While the number increases of those who with diffi- 
culty find ways to spend their money, the number 
also increases of those with no money to spend: I 
have seen the policemen, after midnight, moving stol- 
idly from park bench to park bench, effectually rous- 
ing the homeless sleepers by blows upon their feet: 
I have seen the derelicts disappear doubtfully into 

99 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the darkness : one cold morning at City Hall Park, I 
saw two poor fellows, pathetically anxious to keep up 
their appearance, wash themselves at the fountain, 
wipe themselves with grimy handkerchiefs, and then 
step into the post-office to dry the handkerchiefs on a 
radiator in the corridor. And I have heard rich New 
Yorkers boast offensively of their riches. 

In some degree, such contrasts are to be observed 
in other cities; but in none so strikingly as in New 
York. And often the contrasts are vivid. I have 
seen an archbishop of New York, at his silver jubilee, 
the central figure of a magnificent service in the Ca- 
thedral, with hundreds of the priesthood and of 
churchly dignitaries, of this and other cities, in his 
train, with pomp of silk and purple and cloth of gold, 
with the sounding of great bells, and the triumphant 
pealing of the organ and the sound of singing voices 
and the music of the horns and cymbals and strings 
of a great orchestra, and with a mighty congregation 
packing every inch of the edifice ; and I have seen the 
same archbishop conducting a service in the chapel 
on Blackwell's Island, looking with tears in his eyes 
at the massed array of paupers and prisoners and 
crippled and blind, but dressed in his splendid robes, 
in cope and surplice and stole of cloth of gold, and 
with a mighty golden mitre upon his head, and in his 
hand a golden crozier, to show that high mass on 
Blackwell's was the same as on Fifth Avenue. In- 
stead of great reverberant bells, a little bell in a little 
green-slatted cupola rang forth its summons: in- 
stead of splendid organ and orchestra and choir, there 

100 



SOME CONTRASTS OP THE CITY 

were a crippled player at an old melodeon, and a choir 
of four blind and crippled derelicts: and I noticed 
that the tin vessels, just inside of the entrance, for 
the holy water, were soon dipped empty, and it was 
pitiful to see the late comers groping eagerly in 
the dry vessels for the water which they could not 
find. 

As New York has always been ready with con- 
trasts, I shall dip back into the past for one, and 
speak of that wonderful day of June 25, 1775, when 
Washington, on his way to assume command of the 
Revolutionary army, crossed from the Jersey shore 
to Manhattan and received an ovation; he was re- 
ceived by cheering people, he was driven through the 
city in an open carriage, drawn by white horses ; and 
the royal governor, Tryon, fearfully witnessed Wash- 
ington's crossing of the river from a ship anchored 
in midstream, but did not dare land until nightfall, 
and then went, neglected by the people, to his home 
— and this, though it was more than a year before 
the signing of the Declaration, and although Tryon 
was a man who had won a reputation for ruthless 
hangings in the course of his governorship of North 
Carolina. 

New York, representative as it is in the highest 
degree of the eminently practical, has at the same 
time always possessed emotional possibilities, and 
a favorite form of expression has been that of 
riots. 

As far back as 1788 there were savage riots, still 
known as Doctors' Riots, in the course of which a 

101 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

number were killed and wounded, the cause being ru- 
mors that bodies were stolen and dissected. So in- 
tensely wrought up were the people that when the 
great Baron Steuben and John Jay went out to calm 
them, these distinguished men were incontinently 
driven away with volleys of stones. In 1834 there 
were serious Anti-Slavery riots; and in that same 
year, as if to give variety, there was the odd happen- 
ing of a stone-cutters' riot, which came about be- 
cause of the refusal, for some strange reason, of the 
workmen to use marble as a building material. 

One of the worst riots was that of 1849, in Astor 
Place, the basis of this being the jealousy between the 
friends of two actors, Forrest, an American, and Mac- 
ready, an Englishman. Forrest, so it was believed, 
when in England, had been slighted through Mac- 
ready's efforts, and so Macready was regarded with 
ill-will when he next came to this country. On the 
same evening each of these actors was to play Mac- 
beth — oddly enough, not even a play in which a man 
was the leading character was chosen! — and there 
came a riotous demioustration against Macready; a 
fight developed, and the militia were called out, and 
twenty-two people were killed and a great number 
injured. The Draft Riots of 1863, vdth their horrible 
burnings and tortures and outrages and hnichings, 
with over a thousand people killed and numerous 
buildings destroyed, made one of the worst outbreaks 
that ever disgraced any city. 

Far back in 1837 there was a bread riot, caused by 

102 



SOME CONTRASTS OF THE CITY 

the high price of flour, and some shops were broken 
into and flour was thrown out into the streets and 
destroyed. Just eighty years after this, in 1917, 
there were demonstrations almost serious enough to 
call riots, caused by a great rise in the prices of foods 
of all kinds ; and disorderly throngs gathered and had 
to be dispersed. 

I saw one evening a most dramatic sight on Fifth 
Avenue. The poor, aroused by the leaping upwards 
of food cost to well-nigh impossible prices, had for 
several days been gathering in their own quarters 
and had even gone so far as to beseech help of the 
mayor. Immigrants, most of them, from autocratic 
Russia or the Slavic lands, they had been brought up 
to believe their immediate ruler to be the wielder of 
power and the dispenser of aid; but they had not 
found the help they needed, and it was whispered 
among them that a greater man than the mayor, the 
Governor — and they liked the word ''Governor"! — 
was to be one evening at a great Fifth Avenue hotel ; 
and so as evening came on I saw them gathering, al- 
most all women, and almost all with children in their 
arms, gathering silent and sad, and kept moving by 
the police, but every few rods halting in groups of 
perhaps a score or so, listening to some one of the 
group, until the police roughly bade them again to 
go on. 

There were hundreds and hundreds, perhaps there 
were thousands, a doleful and woebegone sight. 
''Bread!" was their cry, and the wailing infants 

103 



THE BOOK OP NEW YORK 

seemed to echo it. The women did not see the Gov- 
ernor; they were hustled and pushed and rudely or- 
dered about; after a while they crept off to their 
homes like animals to their lairs; and I thought, it 
was sights like this which, in Paris, preceded the 
French Revolution, although the gay and the rich ate 
brioche and paid no heed, and thought the complain- 
ing poor only uninteresting and tiresome. 

This highly practical city is always delightfully 
ready with romance. A gloomy old mansion, which 
only within recent years was destroyed, stood on 
Broadway, south of Madison Square, with a broad 
yard beside it within which was a walled garden ; and 
with the effort of a little neck-stretching, or from the 
vantage point of a carriage, one could see why it was 
that the place was kept up. For it was not, pri- 
marily, for the sake of maintaining a home on Broad- 
way ; it was more for the care of a peacock and a cow ! 
It was a Goelet mansion; so no wonder it was a 
Goelet who married the Duke of Roxburghe and thus 
acquired, as a home, the castle of Floors, with its 
park filled with deer, and with its estate enclosed by 
the longest private stone wall in Great Britain: re- 
minder of the wall for the live-stock of Broad- 
way! 

On Fifth Avenue, a little south of 42nd Street, is 
a vacant lot beside a private house ; and the lot was 
kept open, beside this house, to be a play-space for a 
much-loved dog, although the otherwise unused bit of 
land represented the investment of immense potential 

104 



SOME CONTRASTS OF THE CITY 

capital. Well, the dog is dead now, and the owner is 
dead, and so the lot may at any time be built up. 

The old Van Beuren house on West 14th Street, 
particularly gloomy and black as it was, stood there 
before retail trade came sweeping northward with its 
immense tide of prosperity and its numberless build- 
ings ; and it still stands there, the only private house 
in that region, and about it are still the great green 
grounds, facing now the ebbing of that wonderful 
business tide as years ago it faced the flow ; and at the 
back of the huge old garden, with its moribund trees 
and shrubs, is an old carriage house with arched 
doors, and over these arches is a series of small open- 
ings through which, a strange sight for that dis- 
trict, pigeons still constantly pass in and out : doubt- 
less, pigeons of a long line of inherited Knicker- 
bocker blood! 

Of the human romance in this city which is mis- 
takenly supposed to think of nothing but the making 
of money or the spending of it, that too is likely to 
be typically away from the usual. It would be hard 
to find anything much more romantic than the way 
in which a short-story writer of New York carried 
on his courtship, for, happening to be in London and 
becoming engaged by mail to the girl he loved, who 
at the time happened to be in Chicago, he sent a mes- 
senger boy bearing the engagement ring from Eng- 
land to America, as naturally as if it were just around 
the corner. If, afterwards, divorce soon came— well, 
perhaps even that is not entirely untypical of present- 

105 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

day conditions, at least am6ng such of the New York- 
ers as live swiftly and feverishly : and if to this it be 
added that the writer died in the full flush of life, 
barely on the threshold of middle age, that also may 
be deemed typical of New York. 









106 



CHAPTER IX 

AMONG THE TENEMENTS 





ROADLY speaking, the tene- 
ments of New York are on 
the East Side of the city: 
there is enough of truth in 



^^SMV^^f*-—-^ the idea to justify the com- 

•' '^' r'^i'l^t^ Toaon interchangeableness of 

^^I'lib-^^gfe ' ' East Side " and * ' Tenement 




district" in ordinary talk. 

But there is no truth at all in 

the equally prevalent idea 
that the tenement region represents little besides 
poverty or ignorance or crime or all three, with a 
practical absence of the broadening or intelligently 
pleasurable features of life. 

An author died, on the East Side, in 1916 — an au- 
thor not known to the city in general, but whose 
works, in Yiddish, were familiar to a myriad of read- 
ers. An immense throng packed the streets through 
which his funeral procession moved, the people stand- 
ing reverently, in a weird silence. And as to what 
kind of a man this was, this Sholem ben Menachem 
Rabinowitz, or Sholem Aleichem as he was known, 
who had such a devoted following while living and 

107 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

such masses of mourners when dead, his will may be 
deemed illuminative, for it began : 

"Wherever I die I want to be placed not among 
aristocrats or among the powerful, but among plain 
Jewish laborers, among the very people itself, so that 
the simple graves about me should adorn my grave- 
stone even as the plain good people during my life- 
time illumined their f olkes-schreiber. " 

After all, it should be remembered that there are 
a million Jews in Greater New York : many times the 
total population, including all races, of Jerusalem, 
and three times as many Jews as has Warsaw, the 
city next to New York in Jewish population. 

And to know that such a man as Sholem Aleichem 
was an idol of the tenement dwellers is to revise for- 
ever the commonly held beliefs as to the standards of 
the tenements. 

But it is not necessary to go from one extreme of 
belief to the other : it is not needful to deem the tene- 
ment districts all admirable, merely because it is a 
mistake to deem them all the reverse of admirable. 
Yet it is well to know that a great part of the East Side 
holds itself pridefully, and that it is not without claim 
to consider itself intellectual. 

It would immensely surprise most New Yorkers, 
except the tenement dwellers, to know that, at the 
lower end of Second Avenue, is a big new theater 
where moving pictures are never given, and where 
the full desire is to give only intellectual plays. The 
plays are presented in German- Yiddish, and the au- 
thors are themselves Yiddish, either of this country 

108 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

or of Europe, or else the plays are translations, into 
German-Yiddish, from such authors as Shakespeare 
and Sudermann! The management prides itself on 
giving the highest average of play in New York! — 
but of course, unless one is conversant with Yiddish, 
it is a little difficult to form a definite opinion as to 
this. The theater holds two thousand people, the au- 
diences are generally large, and the admission, al- 
though lower than Broadway standards, is double that 
of the best Broadway moving pictures — box seats be- 
ing two dollars and orchestra seats one dollar. 

Many classes and conditions go to make up the life 
of the great East Side. There is poverty there, and 
there is inconceivable crowding, and there is lack of 
food and air and there is unspeakable misery and 
there is ignorance. But there is also much of happi- 
ness and there are great numbers — perhaps the ma- 
jority — who have plenty of money for comforts and 
gayeties. Many of the tenement dwellers have 
pianos. 

Eents, when a number crowd into a few rooms, do 
not seem so extremely high ; often, and even generally, 
it is the case that not only is the father a wage- 
earner, but that two or three children are also wage- 
earners, so that the total income of a family may be 
comfortably large even though their tenement rooms 
are uncomfortably small. 

Iron fire-ladders gridiron the fronts of the build- 
ings, and in hot weather they are gridirons in very 
truth, baked by the sun to a furious heat. 

Social life, the cheerful intermingling with one an- 

109 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

other, makes a vital difference between the tenement 
section and all other parts of New York. Social clubs 
are a great feature: and if I mention a dance to be 
given by the Broken Shutter Association, with such 
sponsors as Rock Hennessey, Tony Ferito, Tips Bags 
and Sol Carsella, it is because I noticed in a window 
a printed circular, with these names, only to-day. 

But the streets themselves — to make a contradic- 
tion express a fact — are the real club houses of the 
tenements. The tenement population, except when 
the weather is too wet or too cold, and especially in 
the early evening following a hot day, are mostly am- 
bulatory, moving about with genial aimlessness and 
shifting back and forth on the pavements and side- 
walk. The shufifling of feet, the chirring hum of talk, 
the laughter of children, make a wellnigh indistin- 
guishable medley. The vibrant clink of glasses, the 
twanging note of a guitar, the grinding rattle of sur- 
face cars, the thunder of the Elevated, the distant 
clanging of a gong, the tolling of a bell, such are 
among the familiar sounds: and whether the bell is 
for a funeral or for a mass, and whether the gong is 
fire or police or hospital, is known, as if instinctively, 
to all : for these people come to know the streets and 
all that pertains to the streets with a loving intimacy. 

And, thrown close together as they are, in their 
crowded tenements and in the streets, the people know 
the life about them in its every phase. Their friend- 
liness, one to another, their mutual helpfulness, es- 
pecially the generosity of those of slender purse, puts 
to shame the calculated charities of the rich. 

110 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

And the very crowdedness of life makes much for 
mutual mindfulness. If a courting couple wish to 
monopolize a fire-escape balcony instead of wander- 
ing away from home, neighborhood courtesy is apt to 
yield it to them. The great public recreation piers 
have become of vast good in the opportunities made 
cheerfully possible for social pleasure ; and the little 
parks that dot the city, numbers of them having been 
established within recent years, are also important 
social assets. "When the rooms at home are few and 
crowded, young people will generally go elsewhere, 
and it is fortunate that New York has so broad-mind- 
edly provided respectable public resorts. 

The first tenement house of New York was built in 
1833, on Water Street, on a spot which is now within 
the limits of Corlears Park (how few, of those who 
deem themselves real New Yorkers, have any idea 
where that is !) ; it was four stories in height, and each 
floor was arranged for one family. 

The East Side, largely so comfortable and prosper- 
ous, does not understand why the rest of the city, and 
the country in general, feel and express pity for it! 
But it accepts, appreciatively, the vast benefits freely 
offered it by "settlements" and associations; and if 
great part of the benefits go without cost to people 
who could well afford to pay, the efforts are none the 
less well meant, and often do real good, and are an 
admirable outlet for money that otherwise would 
probably be put to not nearly such laudable purpose. 
On the whole, the East Side, in spite of such poverty 
and misery and crime as may really be there (and 

111 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

it may be remarked that too little money, too much 
unhappiness, and incidental illegal acts, are not char- 
acteristic of this portion of the city alone!) repre- 
sents the happiest portion of New York. 

Yet it must not be supposed that the tenement re- 
gion is in every aspect picturesque, for much of it 
looks very humdrum indeed. But much of it is full of 
interest. There are great districts of the city where 
it is almost hopeless to find an English-speaking per- 
son to answer an ordinary question, either on the 
streets or at the doors of the little shops. In these sec- 
tions it is equally difficult to find a newspaper printed 
in English, though you may find on various stands 
newspapers printed in as many as twelve different 
languages or dialects. 

Perhaps no feature of tenement district life is so 
picturesque as that of the street markets, some of 
them busy daylight markets and some being markets 
at night. 

There is a fish market two evenings a week under 
the first arches of Williamsburg Bridge: the stalls, 
roofed by the bridge itself, and lighted by flambeaux, 
might be a market in an archway of ancient Florence. 
There are street markets, with long lines of push- 
carts lined along the curb, just outside of the side- 
walk, on Bleecker Street and just off Tompkins 
Square, and in many other places, and they are not 
only for fruits and vegetables but for cloth and hos- 
iery and kitchenware and a host of things. 

The market on Mulberry Street is of typical inter- 
est. Here the people are mostl}^ Italians. In the 

112 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

windows of the dirty little stores that line the street 
are such signs as "Ristorante. Prezzi 5 c. 10 c," and 
''Trattoria Loganda," and "Banca Italiana," and 
"Grosseria Italiani," and "Lager Beer" — this last 
being clearly untranslatable ! 

The gutters are lined with push-carts standing end 
to end. The sidewalks beside them are lined with 
booths and boxes and tubs and stands. There are 
apples and chestnuts and olives. Some of the women 
sit on the curb, and the basket of one, beside her, is 
partitioned into two halves, one part filled with or- 
anges and the other — delightful incongruity! — with 
onions. 

There are baskets and boxes and booths filled with 
nothing but bread, as if to indicate defiance of the 
saying that man cannot live by bread alone ; and some 
of the bread is white, but much is dark and sodden, 
and you notice that any prospective customer feels at 
full liberty to pick up the loaves, press and feel them 
with more or less clean fingers, and lay them 
down again. There are quantities of peanuts, there 
are sweet potatoes, there are many strings of brilliant 
red peppers, there is booth after booth filled with 
onions, there are tomatoes. There are great bars of 
yellow soap of a size and length such as no one ever 
sees elsewhere. There are many stands for selling 
fish ; perch, smelt, codfish and other varieties. There 
are numberless eels, some of them of monster size 
and others diminutive. 

The ceaseless chaffering and dickering, and the talk 
and laughter of the people who crow^d each other on 

113 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the thronged sidewalks, and the cries of rival dealers 
calling attention to their wares, and the shouts of the 
children who are playing and dodging about, fill the 
air with discordant interest. 

The massed population, all about, is astounding, 
for it is not only that the buildings that line the street 
are filled to overflowing with poor humanity, but that 
behind these buildings are others, out of sight from 
the street, and reached only by narrow tunnel-like 
passages. New York is doing away with rear tene- 
ments, but numbers still remain. 

Many booths and stands are for the sale of all 
sorts of odds and ends, including cheap jewelry, and 
gaudy handkerchiefs, and woolen caps; and fish so 
thoroughly and completely dried that they are noth- 
ing but grisly skeletons. 

It amused me one day to see a Chinaman and Ital- 
ian holding a colloquy together. Tl^e Chinaman had 
thoughts of purchasing a string of some mysterious 
eatable, and the Italian was expatiating on its merits 
and its cheapness with a rapid flow of words. The 
Chinaman could not understand a word he was say- 
ing, but that did not check the eloquence in the least. 
The Italian gesticulated, he exclaimed, he made dra- 
matic pauses, he fluently began over again; hands, 
features and voice were all made to take part in his 
effort to make a sale, and throughout it all the China- 
man silently looked at him, and after some five min- 
utes of Italian eloquence he paid the price and took 
away the string. 

Most interesting of the night street markets is that 

114 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

of Grand Street. Grand Street is the Broadway of 
the East Side. It stretches off interminably in that 
part of it between the Bowery and the East River; 
that region being in the broadest part of Manhattan 
Island. It has long lines of shop fronts on both sides 
of the street, and on Saturday evenings, when the 
shops themselves are all brilliantly alight, the street 
market establishes itself along the curb in long lines. 
The movable booths and the standing push-carts are 
stacked high. In all, it is a vivid and picturesque 
sight. For on Saturday evening the Grand Street 
sidewalks are thick-jammed with thronging people, 
largely foreigners, dressed with the vivid colorings 
that foreigners love. The shops, the street booths, 
the people, the chirring happiness, the lights and 
colors, the eager rush of pleasure and of spending — 
it is a sight to be seen and to be remembered. 

Division Street, where the Second Avenue Elevated 
leads away from Chatham Square, is one of the dark- 
est and blackest of streets, for it is a narrow street, 
and is quite filled by the track structure that extends 
from side to side and blocks out all the sunlight. But 
this street has been picked out, in extraordinary fash- 
ion, for the hat and cloak and gown street of the 
East Side ! From Chatham Square to the Williams- 
burg Bridge the stores show nothing but hats and 
cloaks and gowns. In the windows are hundreds of 
wax figmres, furnished forth with the most recent 
styles. For these shops are not makeshift shops, 
they are not second-hand shops, but are retail houses 
that handle, for the East Side, the fashionable garb 

115 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

of the moment, but at unfashionable prices! And, 
after dark, in the early evening hours, every shop is 
brilliantly lighted, and the daylight blight of the Ele- 
vated is forgotten. East Side business must needs 
give opportunity to its people to buy at night, for so 
many of them work throughout the day. 

Allen Street is another of the exceedingly narrow 
streets of the East Side, and it is also black and dis- 
mal through being completely shaded by the Elevated 
tracks that occupy its width. The street has, for 
years, been the center of the Russian brass trade, with 
fascinating little shops glittering and gleaming with 
thousands of candlesticks and bowls and boxes and 
sconces and kettles made of brass. And recently, 
that portion of the street near Canal Street has been 
the object of the strangest of migrations. For one 
little shop after another has established itself here, on 
this street of narrow blackness, for the handling of 
delicate silk underwear, fluify with soft lace ! There 
is no apparent reason for this : it seems but a freakish 
and needless choice. 

An interesting portion of the East Side is along 
the waterfront of the lower East River, where, al- 
though much of the seafaring life of old clipper days 
has gone, there are still doddering old taverns and 
lodging houses that shelter amphibious folk, and 
there are bowsprits still projecting far over the land, 
and there are strange sea smells of spices and for- 
eign things, and there are Lascars and such strange 
sailor folk leaning over the ships ' rails. 

On the East Side there is a ceaseless shift and 

116 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

change of nationalities and religions. Churches 
change to synagogues and synagogues to churches. 
The Irish give place to the Hebrews, the Hebrews to 
Italians, the Italians perhaps to Slavs. But the sea- 
faring Greeks and their long waterpipes have tena- 
ciously held to a little district not far from Brooklyn 
Bridge, and the flower-dealing Greeks to a district 
near Union Square : — and yet, in writing of New York, 
one cannot with impunity say that anything is a con- 
tinuing fact : even as I write this, the Greeks may be 
migrating to some other locality. Most permanent 
of all have been the Syrians and Chinese; the Syr- 
ians most marvelously so, for decades ago they chose 
tumble-down tenements near the North Eiver, at the 
extreme southern end of Manhattan: a locality that 
no one could have thought of as anything but tem- 
porary, for the most ordinary development would be 
expected to put up great business structures there. 
Yet the tumble-down buildings still unbelievably re- 
main, and the Syrians still inhabit them. 

Strictly speaking, there are many tenements in New 
York that rent for many thousands of dollars a year : 
for in the purview of the law an apartment house, 
no matter how expensive, is a tenement house. But 
in ordinary adaptation, nothing that is expensive is 
a tenement. Perhaps the most vital touchstone, of 
difference, is the front door, which in an apartment 
house is never left open but which, in a tenement 
house, is almost always left open. 

In many, and perhaps most, of the tenement houses 
— using the term again, in its accepted sense — there is 

117 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

only the kitchen fire. The heat of the enclosed house, 
built tightly between other houses, the smallness 
of the rooms, the number of people in them, all make 
it possible to live quite comfortably with the heat of 
but a single stove. Many of the moderate-priced 
apartment houses have also but one fire, the kitchen 
fire, with no heat supplied in any other way; and 
some have heated hallways only. I have heard it es- 
timated that half the population of Manhattan has but 
the kitchen fire, but this estimate seems too high. 

A subtle change has within a few years past come 
over the mighty tenement district. A great part of 
its strength, its idiosyncrasies, its uniqueness, its 
characteristics, has come through its being unbrok- 
enly massed, in solid block after block of great houses. 
This unbroken m^assing gave it an aspect of being a 
city apart, a region by itself, a segregated section, 
and gave its people the feeling of being a people 
apart. All this is still, in the main, unchanged; and 
yet, the sense of being unbrokenly massed has been 
to some degree affected by the enormous tearing away 
of buildings for bridges and bridge approaches, for 
new parks, for public schools, new charitable institu- 
tions. There has been somewhat the effect as of dis- 
turbing and tearing apart an enormous ant hill, and 
thus setting its inhabitants into agitation. 

In the year in which ground was cleared for the 
Pennsylvania Railway Station, a clearing which lev- 
eled block after block of tenements, a clearing was 
also made for one of the great bridges, and these two 
causes made together a tremendous increase in the 

118 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

number of eviction notices: for unless notices were 
formally given, any tenant might at the last moment 
refuse to move, and thereby hamper a great improve- 
ment. The number of these evictions was not in the 
slightest sense a matter of hardship between landlord 
and tenant, but they gave a man an opportunity to 
rise to prominence as an authority on New York life, 
for he wrote a book telling of the oppression of the 
people of the tenements, and expatiating on the 
cruelty of tenement house owners, and he proved his 
point by giving the positively startling total of evic- 
tion notices for the year which had just ended. It 
is not at all improbable that he was himself unaware 
of the reason behind the notices, and that in conse- 
quence he wrote with all the fire of mistaken convic- 
tion. 

Tompkins Square is an unusually large square east 
of Second Avenue, surrounded by a region of tene- 
ments; the square itself being now used mainly for 
public playgrounds for the thousands of children who 
come here, especially on Saturdays. 

But perhaps it is most interesting on account of 
the memories evoked by a stone fountain, designed 
with simple dignity, which stands over in the south- 
west corner. On the face of the fountain are two 
attractive little children, a boy and a girl; the boy 
standing protectingly over the girl and the girl nes- 
tling at his feet. The fountain was erected in mem- 
ory of those who lost their lives through the burn- 
ing of the steamer Slociim, in the East River, in 1904. 
Hundreds of women and children were needlessly 

119 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

drowned or burned to death on that terrible day, and 
most of the families lived in the immediate neighbor- 
hood of this square. I remember one of the bereaved 
parents, a grievously saddened man, saying that he 
did not understand why, if God should take such 
trouble to save the Hebrews in the Red Sea, he did 
not save New Yorkers in the East River. 

The lower East Side was the part of the city where, 
in early days, the greater part of the rich and pros- 
perous dwelt. Most of the early shipping docked 
along the East River. It was on the East Side that 
warehouses and stores first arose. Throughout that 
region long rows of fine mansions were built. Mean- 
while, the West Side was slow in developing, largely 
because to quite an extent it was swampy land, or 
cut by channels of sluggish water. Until well into the 
nineteenth century the East Side retained its social 
and business leadership. 

The city gave solemn commemorative exercises on 
the death of President Harrison, ' ' Old Tippecanoe, ' ' 
in 1841. Business was totally suspended for the day, 
the city was draped in black, and there was a proces- 
sion of some thirty thousand men, although it was 
a day of storm: and, to cover the very best part of 
the city, the paraders went from City Hall Park, by 
way of East Broadway and Grand Street and the 
Bowery, to Union Square, returning thence along 
Broadway : thus ignoring the West Side, and march- 
ing first through streets that are now in the very 
heart of the tenement district. 

Many a tremulous and superannuated old building 

120 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

still stands on the tenement streets, many and many a 
detail of interest has been preserved, many and many 
a charming old fanlight or fireplace or pillared door- 
way ; and at any time a house with such treasure may 
be torn down and if you are on hand at the time you 
may be able to carry some of the treasure away. 
Only yesterday I passed an old-time building near 
Washington Square that was in the last stages of 
demolition; a quick look about the fast disappearing 
ruins showed that only one thing remained, but that 
was a carved newel post of solid mahogany; and, so 
it happened, it was something that I especially hap- 
pened to need ! 

Stanford White, the great New York architect, used 
to come home from Europe with treasure torn out of 
old-time buildings, which he put into buildings in New 
York; but he also knew the value of old New York 
remains; and I remember, in particular, a beautiful 
mantelpiece which he secured at the tearing do^vn of 
DePauw Row, on Bleecker Street, and built into a 
hotel which he was at that time erecting. De Pauw 
Eow, itself, had long been a romantic relic of the past, 
with its traditions of wealthy living, and its arched 
entrances to the curving drive within its inner court 
— which, by the way, made the place, after the depart- 
ure of wealth and fashion, a veritable thieves ^ para- 
dise from the various exits and entrances w^hich fa- 
cilitated the dodging of the police. 

The most notable old spiral staircase in New York, 
a marvel of construction, was in the old Cafe Boule- 
vard on Second Avenue : and I read in a nev/spaper, 

121 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

which told of the destruction of the building, that the 
wonderful stair was torn to pieces and thrown away ! 
What an opportunity missed by the many who could 
have used it to splendid advantage. The most beau- 
tiful doorway in Deerfield, that Massachusetts village 
of ancient houses of sweetness and charm, was not 
made for the house in which it stands, was not made 
in Deerfield or even in New England, but was secured 
by an artist on the tearing down of an old house in the 
Greenwich Village section of New York City ! 

Always and constantly, in New York, one notices 
changes. Going about, a few years ago, with an old 
gentleman of eighty, a visitor from the West, who had 
come back to New York to see the localities familiar 
when he was a man of middle-age, he was deeply in- 
terested in the retail business, which had advanced 
to the vicinity of 23rd Street, and he was amazed that 
it had gone so far north. How much more amazed 
would he now be, to find the center at 42nd Street, 
with no one able to say where it will be to-morrow! 
Then he insistently wanted to go down-town. Grand 
Street was the best shopping street of the city in his 
earlier years, he remembered, and so to Grand Street 
we went, where there had been the best retail stores, 
not merely for the East Side but for both sides of 
the city. But what changes he found! It was still 
a wonderfully busy street, but everything that he had 
known was gone. 

When I think of the picturesque things that I have 
seen among the tenements, always there comes the 
memory of the study-room of some rabbis, in a tum- 

122 



AMONG THE TENEMENTS 

ble-down old structure on Orchard Street ; a building 
of frame, standing tremulously as with the stoop of 
an old man. 

Perhaps the building has gone by now. I have not 
seen it for a year — and in New York all buildings, 
whether old or new, exist in the constant shadow of 
the terrible epitaph, ''Torn Down"; but it is, if the 
usual New York fate has not befallen it, an interest- 
ing place, with this low-ceilinged room reached by two 
flights of stumbling stairs. Around the room were 
cases filled with books and manuscripts. There were 
a few small tables and some chairs. The room was 
lighted by lamps that seemed to burn but dimly, and 
the old men, poring over the Talmud and the parch- 
ments of rabbinical lore, had thick dark hair under 
close-fitting skull-caps, and beards of great length, 
and softly glowing eyes, and fingers tenuous and al- 
most clawlike from the constant handling of crumbly 
pages. It was a place of silence and dignity, a pic- 
torial place, with patriarchal faces half in shadow and 
half in light, and lambent lusters on sheets of golden 
yellow. It made a scene that would be remarkable 
even in the Ghetto of Amsterdam or Frankfort-on- 
the-Main. 







123 



CHAPTEE X 



TAMMANY 



"HEN the American army was 
awaiting formal disband- 
ment, at the close of the 
Revolutionary War, and was 
lying in cantonments on the 
Hudson, ready to march in 
and take possession of New 
York and considered, so to 
speak, the entire Revolu- 
tionary incident closed, it 
came to the officers that it 
would be a fine thing to per- 
petuate their friendship in 
the bonds of an association. 
The idea, once thought of, was so attractive that offi- 
cer after officer declared himself enthusiastically for 
it, and an organization was effected. 

Washington was the first officer to sign the paper 
which represented the objects of the new society and 
outlined its plan. He signed in his oddly usual way, 
not with the "George," as would naturally, at least 
nowadays, be expected, and not simply with the in- 
itial *'G.," but with the abbreviation *'Go.," the tiny 
"o" being scarcely noticeable above the line, and 

124 




TAMMANY 

with a pronounced flourish in the crossing of the *'t.'* 
Those first signers of the constitution of the So- 
ciety of Cincinnati make an interesting list. There 
is an unobtrusive "Nath. Green, Maj.Gen."; then 
comes, with the flourish as of a schoolboy, a shakily 
written "Eufus Putnam, B.Genl."; there are lesser 
known generals, such as Greaton and Layton and 
Huntington; there is ''B.Lincoln,M.G."; there are 
colonels and surgeons and quartermasters mingling 
with the generals; there is the odd signature of the 
mighty Major-General Knox, ''H.Knox,'' with the 
*'H" and "K" making together a simple monogram; 
there is Baron Steuben, signing in his foreign way, 
without given name, and following with a fancifully 
scrolled ''M.G." 

The society was given its name of the Cincinnati 
because, "The officers of the American Army, hav- 
ing generally been taken from the Citizens of Amer- 
ica, possess high veneration for the character of that 
illustrious Roman, Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus, and 
are resolved to follow his example by returning to 
their citizenship." The organization was not only 
to perpetuate friendships, but also to "extend the 
most substantial acts of beneficence towards those 
officers and their families who may be under the ne- 
cessity of receiving it"; and the society Avas to con- 
tinue forever, through taking in descendants of the 
original members. 

All this arranged, and the planning of it having 
served to break the ennui of waiting for the British 
to complete their preparations and sail away, the 

125 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Americans gail}^ marched down into New York; Gen- 
eral Washington himself, first president of the Cin- 
cinnati, spending the night before actually entering 
the city at the Van Cortlandt mansion, still standmg 
in Van Cortlandt Park, where he dressed himself, 
as is recorded, with particular care for the solemn 
occasion of taking possession of the place that the 
British had held for years. It would almost seem 
that no man in history has had quite so much re- 
corded about his clothes as George Washington ; and 
this was not because he was in the least a Beau 
Brummel, but that he deemed the matter of excel- 
lent clothes a matter excellently worth while seeing 
to, and that in this, as in everything, he impressed 
his personality on all who wrote about him. 

And so the officers of the army had become the 
Cincinnati — and without the slightest suspicion that 
they had done something that was to raise a mighty 
storm! For the people in general did not like the 
idea of the well-meant Cincinnati with their elaborate 
jeweled insignia. To the mass of the people it sa- 
vored altogether too much of aristocratic exclusive- 
ness ; they feared that the officers were to perpetuate 
themselves as a powerful body, set apart in interests 
that would not be those of the nation. Such a storm 
of opposition arose as threatened the very existence 
of the Cincinnati, and made it everywhere unpopu- 
lar; but no result of the general opposition was so 
important as the formation of Tammany. 

For Tammany was organized six years after the 
organization of the Cincinnati, in the year in which 

126 



TAMMANY 

"Washington became President of the United States, 
and as a protest against the Cincinnati. As the first 
organization was held to represent an aristocracy of 
rank, the second was understood to stand for the in- 
terests of what are termed the common people. 

It is odd that the mighty New York organization 
of Tammany, which almost at once rose to promi- 
nence and power, should have taken as its name that 
of a Philadelphia Indian! For Tammany was a 
prominent Indian chief, commonly referred to as 
Tamenund, whose headquarters were in the vicinity 
of what is now Doylestown, a suburb to the north- 
ward of Philadelphia ; and that is why the Tammany 
men still call themselves ''Braves," and why their 
headquarters is the "Wigwam." 

As a political organization, Tammany became 
probably the strongest and best organized that the 
world has ever known. That it became not only a 
power, but at the same time a power for evil and for 
what is known as "graft," is well known; but there 
have been many phases that are not well known, for 
Tammany is by no means all evil. 

A central head dictates the affairs and policy of 
Tammany. It is thus an autocracy. But under this 
central head, supporting the leader and in turn by 
him supported, is a wonderful body of leaders, each 
man the choice of his district. And Tammany is 
thus a democracy. The district leaders, in turn, wield 
their power and gain their information through an 
organization of local captains. 

That many a Tammany man is a man entirely un- 

127 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

scrupulous is quite true : selfishness, the acceptance of 
bribes, the levying of contributions — these things, on 
the part of some, are not to be denied. But Tammany 
can fairly point out, on the other hand, that "Reform" 
is often, if not usually, but a screen behind which are 
hiding men quite as unscrupulous as any of Tammany. 
Politics develops both the good and the bad of man- 
kind. I have not the slightest thought of either de- 
fending or attacking Tammany; it is only that the 
organization represents a vital phase of New York 
life, and therefore ought to be understood. And it is 
well that there have been alternations in city control, 
between Tammany and "Reform," for in that way 
there has always been a check upon both sides. And 
Tammany, and many a Tammany man, has done 
much for the city ; much of excellence and fineness and 
much of permanent value. 

The district leader is a picturesque figure, repre- 
senting a picturesque condition. For a district leader, 
to be successful, must be a man of ability and deter- 
mination, the possessor of tact and resourcefulness. 
He is mediaeval! He is the head of a clan, his clan 
being every member of his party, every actual and 
potential follower, within the bounds of his district. 
He must know, personally as far as possible, and with 
absolute completeness through his captains and their 
assistants, the main facts in regard to everybody and 
everything in his territory. And he does ! 

He watches over his followers with a fatherly and 
watchful eye. He is ready to help them in a hun- 
dred ways. He sees to the getting of jobs; generally 

128 



TAMMANY 

city jobs, but not infrequently jobs that are not politi- 
cal. And lie sees that his clansmen vote ''right." 

The district leader has the power and the responsi- 
bilities of a tribal chief, and he expects obedience. 
And when there is some upheaval imminent he must, 
even if he cannot prevent it, at least know all about it 
before it actually comes. 

The late "Battery Dan," one of the strongest of all 
district leaders, expected, in advance of any election, 
to be able to forecast, with absolute precision, how 
from 93 to 95 out of every 100 of the men of his 
district, of both parties, were going to vote. And if 
ever his prognostication was wrong he felt deeply 
mortified. 

The motto of another leader, who made a point of 
being generous in regard to giving pleasant times to 
the children, was, frankly, that ' ' There 's votes in the 
crying of a baby made sick by a stomachful of free ice 
cream ! ' ' 

That the Tammany district leaders are always ready 
to be called upon for aid or advice has been an im- 
mense bulwark of their strength. One of them, run- 
ning for alderman, against an extremely wealthy and 
public-spirited candidate put up by the opposition, 
based his campaign — and it was a difficult campaign, 
as the normal opposition outnumbered him — upon the 
declaration, repeated at meeting after meeting : 

''You know me. Elect me and I'll be an alderman 
of the people, ready to help at any hour of the day 
or night. But elect a millionaire — and you'll be ar- 
rested if you ring his doorbell after dark ! ' ' And of 

129 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

course he was elected. The leader of a neighboring 
district made himself a candidate for the State Legis- 
lature. "I'll be better for you than a Daniel Web- 
ster ! ' ' was his slogan — and he won. 

The district leader does not, as a rule, and unless 
for some special reason or the satisfying of some par- 
ticular personal ambition, take office : his power is ex- 
erted in selecting other men for office and in seeing 
that they are elected — if he can. For the important 
offices, beyond the local jurisdiction of the individual 
leader, the general council of leaders decides: or, as 
a matter of fact, the one man who is leader of Tam- 
many Hall and upon whose personal judgment the 
final decision must usually rest. Tammany displays, 
constantly, the successful practical combination of 
autocratic and democratic methods. 

Tammany has added so much of the interesting to 
New York life that, from the standpoint of pictur- 
esqueness, it is a pity that its power seems to be on 
the wane and its idiosyncrasies to be passing. 

The Sullivans, until death took them, one by one, 
held immense power as district leaders throughout 
recent years, and **Big Tim," the leader of the Sul- 
livan leaders, was a man of unusual personality. His 
annual picnic to College Point used to be one of the 
great features of the East Side. At least six thou- 
sand men would go, by specially chartered steamboats, 
and the day would be spent in games and play; for 
the day, the thousands of men were boys again. And 
that each member of the Sullivan organization had to 
pay five dollars for the day 's pleasure, which included 

130 



TAMMANY 

a grand dinner — ^the cooking for six thousand men 
being in itself an achievement of magnitude ! — was no 
deterrent. It was a favor to be permitted to pay the 
five dollars. And all the shop-keepers and contract- 
ors and other people, who hoped for favors, were glad 
to buy tickets even if they knew they could not use 
them. And the list of complimentary invitations was 
always small. 

The occasion was not made the excuse for an orgy ; 
it was always a well-ordered affair; only a few men 
would get drunk, and they were unostentatiously 
cared for in one way or another. The ' ' committee on 
fights ' ' was a delightful feature, it being composed of 
a number of the huskiest fighters, one or another of 
whom, when a man began to be disagreeable or to act 
as if he wanted a quarrel, would patiently try to curb 
his belligerence by pacific words, and then, if the dis- 
turber still wanted a fight — would obligingly and very 
swiftly give it to him ! It was a remarkably success- 
ful committee. 

The home-coming was always in the early darkness, 
and there was a parade to the club headquarters on 
the Bowery, and the people knew over which streets 
the men were to march, and crowds packed those 
streets, massing on the sidewalks and on the steps 
and at the windows. Every man and woman and 
child was out, either marching or welcoming ! And as 
the procession, headed by *'Big Tim," in an automo- 
bile, went on, with the music of many bands, innumer- 
able roman-candles, sent up from both sides of the 
streets, formed a brilliant arch of continuous fire, and 

131 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

everybody was wildly happy, and when the procession 
turned into the Bowery, up near Cooper Union, and 
headed southward, and every band blew full strength 
on the spirited marching tunes of ''Tammany," or 
"The Bowery," and big bonfires blazed and vastly 
more roman-candles than on the other streets filled the 
air with colored fire, it made a strange and vividly 
inspiring sight. It was a great clan displaying pas- 
sionate devotion to its mediaeval head. 

Unless one knows something of the reciprocal per- 
sonal service and personal loyalty of leader and fol- 
lowers, the power of Tammany cannot be understood. 
A district leader who even yet wields enormous per- 
sonal power loves to make his annual "picnic" — a 
popular name, to describe varied forms of East Side 
happiness — an all-day affair at a great "garden" up 
Harlemward, beginning early in the day, with the 
women and children, for whom all sorts of entertain- 
ment are given free, with free refreshments, and con- 
tinuing well on into the night. I have seen this leader 
stand as at a reception, meeting and greeting each one 
of an interminable stream, apparently knowing every- 
one, calling most by name; I have seen the men im- 
mensely proud at being recognized and greeted and 
having their hands shaken, and have seen the shy 
pride with which their wives were led forward to re- 
ceive, also, a handclasp and a few cordial words, and 
it has seemed as if here could be seen the strength of 
Tammany, the explanation of it all. 

And the leaders, as if to add to the mediaeval simili- 
tude, maintain a great degree of personal dignity; 

132 



TAMMANY 

their cordiality and approachableness do not take 
away, in the minds of their following, from the sense 
of their being on a higher plane ; they are friends, but 
they make it clear that they are also rulers. 

The character of many of the acts of Tammany 
leaders and the callousness of their attitude in regard 
to such things have given plenty of justification for 
attack and criticism. But that Tammany could suffer 
from the disclosures of the ''Tweed Eing" and, after 
a short eclipse, could again wield supreme power in 
the city, is the strongest proof of its deep-based 
strength. And it did this because its strength had 
been organized with practical wisdom and was 
founded upon the affections of the mass of the voters. 

That the strength of the organization is on the wane 
is mainly due to causes outside of itself. For years 
it withstood the attacks of foes throughout the State, 
who tried to defeat its men and measures at general 
elections and by means of the Legislature, but a 
mighty blow at its power was struck when Greater 
New York was organized, for the tremendous voting 
power of Brooklyn, with that of Long Island City and 
the Bronx and Staten Island, none of which had sym- 
pathy with Tammany, was thus to be thrown into the 
scale at every election. But even yet it is a tremen- 
dous power. 

The secret of Tammany's success — quite an open 
secret, however little it may have been generally rec- 
ognized — has been that it has always had many men of 
education and capacity in its ranks. 

The Wigwam, the headquarters of Saint Tammany 

133 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

— for, to add to the freaklshness of it, the appellation 
of *' Saint" has from early days been attached to the 
Indian chief's name — is on East 14th Street, just east 
of Irving Place and the Academy of Music. It is a 
brick building, several stories high, particularly hum- 
drum and ordinary of aspect ; and this is odd, for con- 
sidering the important things, bad and good, that 
Tammany has done, the power that it has wielded, 
the plans that have been formulated, it would seem 
natural to find a headquarters building which looks as 
the headquarters of such an old and interesting or- 
ganization, with its mediaeval form of power, ought to 
look. But nothing could be more unpicturesque than 
this dull and commonplace structure, or more the re- 
verse of mediaeval. 

And, after all, it might be suggested by its enemies, 
as to the society itself, that it possesses more of the 
evil than the mediaeval. 













CHAPTER XI 

THE CITY OF FOKEIGNEES 

|0 say such things as that New 
York has more Irish than 
Dublin and more Italians than 
Rome — and such statements, 
incredible though they ap- 
pear, are not jests but facts — 
only begins to represent the 
marvel of New York as a for- 
eign city. More races mingle 
here, and in greater numbers, 
than in any other city of any period of the world. 

There are, too, some Americans in New York ! As 
a New Yorker, Julian Street, has admirably expressed 
it, an American in New York is at the mercy of the 
Greeks, Italians, Russians, Irish, French and Swiss, 
with no American consul to appeal to ! 

That what used to be considered the American type 
has almost disappeared from the New York streets, is 
one of the interesting changes that have accompanied 
this making of the city into the *' melting pot" of the 
world. As a feature and a factor of the streets, the 
American type has been largely overwhelmed, oblit- 
erated, swamped, by the flood of new-comers. In the 

135 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

course of years a new general type will be developed ; 
whether better or worse, more attractive or less at- 
tractive, to be decided only by time. 

Although it is to be regretted that a vast proportion 
of the foreigners who have come in within recent years 
have brought but little of their native picturesqueness 
with them, there is, if one but looks for it, much of the 
picturesque to be found. 

Turn aside from Fifth Avenue at 97th Street, and 
go eastward for half a block, and you may go straight 
into Moscow ! — for always, this is a city of potential 
surprises. 

Flush with the sidewalk, tight built between houses 
on either side, is a building with onion towers of blu- 
ish green, onion towers with the Kremlin twist ; and 
you enter the building, and are within the Russian 
Cathedral. Your first surprise is that, in this city of 
hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews, there are also 
enough Russians to have, not synagogues, but a cathe- 
dral. But so it is, for these are Russians of the Rus- 
sian Church. 

What first strikes you is color, colors of the Orient ; 
and yet not precisely of the Orient, for these colors 
are of shades that are entirely unusual, shades that 
give a sense of the barbaric, and yet which are at the 
same time highly effective in their combinations. The 
interior is very high, but the floor space is not large. 
There is a music gallery, filled with singers, and the 
voices, all male voices, richly chant, without instru- 
mental accompaniment, impressive Russian music 
with its unexpected time. 

136 



THE CITY OF FOEEIGNERS 

Across the entire front, behind the altar, is a rere- 
dos, brilliant with a line of archways each of which 
is filled by a richly colored holy picture ; and although 
the pictures are not art, as Western nations under- 
stand art, they are striking; and perhaps this effect- 
iveness comes because the long line of color adds to 
the general color effect of the cathedral. For the en- 
tire interior is rich in colors, and the rose and gold 
and blues, greens and grays and pinks, are just fas- 
cinatingly a little away from the pinks and grays and 
greens and blues and gold and rose that Americans 
know. 

The officiating priest, probably what we should term 
the archbishop, comes through an opening door from 
an inner shrine which seems a blaze of brilliant brass, 
like a room of gold. He is rotund of figure and oro- 
tund of voice; it is a voice which rolls and rumbles 
and soars and sinks gloriously. He is clad in a white 
garment, full-hanging, touching the very floor, a gar- 
ment of silver-tissue, a magnificent fabric; and in 
colorful contrast is his tall plain brimless Russian hat, 
all black. 

There are no chairs. The congregation stand ex- 
cept at kneeling-times and then all plump down with- 
out hesitation, including fur-clad women and prosper- 
ous men. 

Most of the congregation are ordinary humble-folk, 
but all, and the priests themselves, seem of an im- 
mense sincerity, freely kissing the cross, freely kissing 
a holy picture as they leave; and, more than this, 
evincing sincerity in their general aspect and conduct. 

137 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

The floor space is packed to the doors. Fully two- 
thirds of the people are men. Most of the women 
carry babies, and they edge their way to the side of 
the altar, where a priest in black deftly takes the 
babies and carries them to the back of the altar, and 
blesses and sprinkles them, and hands the little tow- 
heads — for all seem really tow-heads! — ^back to the 
Tartar-faced high-cheek-boned mothers who now, ra- 
diant with happiness, eagerly grasp them again and 
creep quietly away. And intermittently and for long 
periods the choir sings and the priests antiphonally 
chant. 

Would you go from Russia to Southern France? 
You may do so by simply going from here to the 
Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, over in Brooklyn. 
Behind the altar of the church is a representation of 
the Grotto of Lourdes, following it in shape and so 
far as possible in size, with imitation rocks and shrubs, 
and in the center of all an actual opening, a cave or 
grotto extending back for some fifteen feet. 

It is a church which carries on the idea, here in mod- 
ern New York, of the miraculous healing of the sick at 
the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France. A 
special service that I attended began at eight in the 
evening. The large church was packed to the doors. 
At the signal of a handclap, little lights began to twin- 
kle all over the church, for every one of the congre- 
gation had been holding a candle in readiness. Soon 
the twinkling became a great soft glow. 

A procession was silently formed, and it slowly 
passed behind the altar and in front of the grotto, 

138 



THE CITY OF FOEEIGNEES 

where, in a curving line, those were now kneeling or 
sitting who had come for cure. Leading the proces- 
sion was a white-veiled child, with a face of wonderful 
sweetness ; following her were acolytes, in white and 
red, and white-veiled girls, and then, in irregular or- 
der, the entire congregation, and then came the cel- 
ebrant and his attendant priests; the celebrant gor- 
geous in cloth of gold and walking beneath a purple 
and gold canopy upheld by four pole-bearers. 

The celebrant walked slowly past the group of suf- 
ferers, touching each with the monstrance, blessing all, 
inaudibly praying for all. And it was pitiful to see 
the sick ones gradually look about, in slow and puzzled 
doubt, as congregation and priests moved on and left 
them. Some sobbed quietly, a few got up and crept 
away or mingled with the departing congregation ; a 
few still knelt and prayed as, one by one, the sexton 
extinguished the lights around the grotto. 

Of Asiatics, two races have segregated themselves 
in New York in considerable number : from the west- 
ern verge of Asia, the Syrians, and, from the eastern 
edge of Asia, the Chinese, who have a ''quarter" in a 
tiny section, on Mott Street, between Bayard Street 
and Chatham Square, with Pell Street and Doyer 
Street immediately adjoining. It makes an odd little 
triangular quarter, with an illusive sense of the intri- 
cate. 

The buildings of Chinatown are mostly old and 
almost tumbledown tenement houses; some are even 
the old two-story houses with dormered attics, but by 
some magic the Chinese have managed to infuse into 

139 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the district more than a touch of the magic and the 
mystery of the Orient. Fire-escapes glowing with 
color, narrow streets permeated by the silent-stepping, 
soft-slippered olive-faced folk, with their long eyes 
seeming to see nothing yet seeing all ; the shape of an 
a^vning, the odd mingling of hues, the flowery gar- 
ments, the projecting vertical Chinese signs, the tun- 
ics, the queues, the trinkets and fabrics and porcelains 
in the windows of the little shops, the idols, the vases, 
the silks, the sweetmeats, the boxes of tea, all tell of 
the distant Orient. 

An old Chinaman, at a window, is playing, on a 
Chinese flute, a tune that is older than the Chinese 
Wall: ** River of the Lotos," or some such name, a 
Chinaman will tell you that it is — if you are so for- 
tunate as to hit upon a Chinaman who will translate 
for you. But most of them, even of such as under- 
stand English, will not talk with strangers, and pre- 
tend to know nothing but prices. And from the olive 
masks that serve them as faces their slits of eyes look 
out at you with curious impassiveness. 

The soft clanging of a gong, the indistinct sounds of 
Chinese music, perhaps the clash of cymbals or a thrill- 
ing dissonance of strings, from some entranceway or 
floating down from some window or coming vaguely 
out of nowhere, some slender strain, vivid with its 
touch of something different and alien and Oriental; 
the soft voices in an unknown tongue, the serene and 
silent gravity ; all mark it as a place apart. And the 
maker of rice-cakes : — watch him on a hot night work- 
ing over the fire which is burning in his window ; how 

140 



THE CITY OF FOREIGNERS 

oblivious he is to the heat of the fire and of the 
night itself ! how cool and placid he is ! 

The private affairs of Chinatown are conducted by 
a committee, of a dozen or so, elected by themselves, 
and an annually chosen ''mayor," so called. But the 
rival Tongs are the forces which seem to an onlooker 
the most important: the On Leongs and Hip Sings, 
whose sleepless rivalry often becomes so fierce that 
murder is in the very air and death lies in wait at 
corners and in passageways. And for a few minutes 
following a tragedy there is a rush and a tangle, a 
scurry and flurry, a brief break in the placidity, and 
then the police, alike the uniformed and the ''plain- 
clothes men," pounce right and left to seize and in- 
terrogate, while the district swiftly resumes its baf- 
fling calm. And it is odd that such a folk, who walk 
and talk so quietly, should usually choose the noisy 
pistol rather than the quiet knife. 

The police are seldom out of sight in Chinatown, 
and the one familiar crime is that of killing, and 
the familiar misdemeanors those of gambling and 
opium-smoking. 

There is a joss-house, with incense and candles, 
that has great attraction for the sight-seers who pil- 
grimage to Chinato^vn, and there are restaurants 
where these pilgrims are given what they take to be 
Chinese food. There was long a theater there, but 
it has lately been discontinued : a theater which fol- 
lowed the best traditions of the Chinese stage, pre- 
senting plays without footlights, without scenery, 
without orchestra, to a Chinese audience that 

141 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

watched without applause. Historic plays they usu- 
ally were, given with odd fancies as to action and ac- 
cessories. 

The tottering old tenements are cleaner than the 
average tenements of the city : for there is a neatness 
and orderliness and dislike of dirt among these peo- 
ple. Incredibly packed as they are in their restricted 
quarters, in their old houses with little rooms, their 
neat-handedness, their carefulness, their self-com- 
mand make their district by far the safest of all the 
tenement districts as to fire : in fact, a fire is a very 
rare event: and I remember into what a wild com- 
motion they were thrown, one day, by the dashing 
of engines and firemen into their narrow streets in 
response to an alarm. It was an excitement such as 
no mere killing could have caused! 

The Greeks of the city, picturesque from their 
long-tubed water-pipes, are mostly merchants in a 
small way: like the Chinese, they bring their own 
secret societies and racial ways, but if they must 
needs use a weapon they prefer the knife. But they 
are mostly a quiet folk, not always above a little 
genial guile. I noticed one day a Greek name over 
the door of an olive-oil shop: a positively lovely 
name, of precisely ten tempting syllables : and I said 
to myself that here would be the pure, unadulterated 
article from some sunny hill-slope by the blue ^gean, 
and when I looked in the window and saw bottles and 
demijohns of delectable shape I felt still more pro- 
foundly the sense that here was absolute reliability, 
that olive oil must be perfect if bought of a Greek 

142 



THE CITY OF FOREIGNERS 

whose name took ten syllables and if carried away 
in one of those delightful glass shapes: but at the 
door I hesitated — for at the back of the little shop I 
caught sight of three barrels, on each of which was 
plainly stenciled "South Carolina Cotton Seed Oil"! 

Wigged women of the Ghetto may still be seen — 
those of a branch of the Yiddish who, following an 
anciently established custom, cut their hair short at 
the time of their marriage so as to make themselves 
unattractive to other men than their husbands — 
who, of course, are expected still to be pleased with 
their looks! — and thereafter wear coarse black wigs. 
But the number of these wigged women seems to be 
decreasing: one does not so often see them: nor does 
one quite so often see the old Hebrew with a long 
curl hanging down in front of each ear. And one 
does notice, markedly, a new development in the 
American-born daughters of certain classes of the 
Yiddish, who, at work-quitting time, throng on the 
sidewalks and crowd into the street cars, with a push- 
ing boldness of manner and appearance which makes 
a new type that is neither European nor American. 

And there are still thousands of children in New 
York, the children of those who have been coming 
over from Southern Europe in cargo loads, who, in 
spite of the sanitary efforts of school teachers and 
visitors from the ''settlements," are sewed up when 
winter comes on, not to be unsewed until spring, 
thus keeping the children constantly warm and sav- 
ing the mothers a great deal of trouble ! 

The Italians have retained in New York a vast 

143 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

amount of their native Italian ways. In the first 
place, they feel at home here, and especially those of 
the southern part of Italy. The tenements and tene- 
ment streets of New York are curiously like those of 
Naples. In both cities there are solid rows of tall 
buildings, filling street after street, with each build- 
ing a hive of human life. 

The chestnuts on long strings, the ninepin-shaped 
skins hanging full of lard, the cheeses of all colors, 
the dried mushrooms in garlands, the silvery garlic, 
the pastry-cakes of varied hues, the white sheets of 
macaroni, the red or green peppers, the street cries, 
the music — it is a veritable Naples. 

Nor are the Italian quarters of the city without 
the love of literature. There are the lives of S. 
Eocco, S. Girolamo, S. Luigi, S. Anna; there are 
little paper chapbooks on Gugiielmo Tell and Pablo y 
Virginia, and I even noticed a paper-backed trans- 
lation of "Ivanhoe," which the dealer handled re- 
spectfully, knowing it to be the work of an honored 
author, and pronouncing it, of course, with the ac- 
cent on the second syllable, *'Ee-van-ho-ay.*' 

Some of the streets leading northward from Chat- 
ham Square; the district immediately southwest of 
Washington Square; a great district around Prince 
Street, west of the Bowery; some of the tenement 
streets of the East Side up in Harlem — such, to- 
day, are among the most prominent of the Italian 
quarters. 

And all is so colorful! You see bright yellow 
headcloths, red kerchiefs, purple and lavender waists, 

144 



THE CITY OF FOBEIGNEES 

neckties of magenta or pink, strange Italian greens 
and blues, a man with a soft shirt in a pattern of red 
and yellow roses, a yellow neck handkerchief for tie 
and a cap of startling hue, a woman with skirt of red 
and waist of purple and handkerchief of blue. 

The American-born New Yorker has come to like 
the Italians: they are sunny-dispositioned and smil- 
ing and are born with manners: they are fruit and 
vegetable lovers: and these things make them seem 
human and kindred in spirit. 

Saint's Day in an Italian street of New York is 
unreservedly an Italian festa. The streets, arched 
with little oil lights in tumblers of colored glass, the 
flags, the banners, the festoonings, the tinsel, the 
flowers, the color and life of the throngs that are at 
once so gay and so devout, the scarlets and violets 
and saffrons and greens, the baldachino set up in the 
open air, in the open street, with its effigies of the 
Madonna and Child — yes ; it is a veritable Naples ! 

And, as in Naples, the language of the hands, the 
arms, the fingers, an elaborate language of gesticula- 
tion, is freely used. It came into use over there from 
the ease that it gave to conversation between any one 
in an upper room and one on the pavement, and the 
importance was accentuated by the constant police 
surveillance of the Neapolitan Camorra. 

You see an Italian, at an upper window, make a 
swift motion of the hands, away from the body, with 
the palms outward and a handkerchief in the right 
hand; and one who understands the sign language 
would know that he is saying to some distant friend, 

U5' 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

**I don't want to go." The motion is slow, with a 
long sweep, and with the head thrown back, whereas 
precisely the same motion, with the head held nor- 
mal and still, and the motion itself made short and 
several times repeated, means, "I'll go" — and such 
a message may be the acknowledg-ment of an invita- 
tion or perhaps a warning. A sweep of the right 
hand, curving outward, with forefinger extended 
and head slightly inclined forward, means, ''To- 
morrow." 

The motions and signs and variants are infinite. 
As an Italian put it, one day when I spoke of this 
language of gesticulation — his name was, delight- 
fully, Giannottasio, and he had translated his first 
name into Michael — "For anything the heart say, 
we have the gestickle." 




'■mmm 

— ~. *- ^iJ-^- ''Uic=y 1*4, ' . "jrr^^^Vil 







146 




CHAPTEE XII 

TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES 

OW much higher, one won- 
ders, was the Tower of 
Babel, than this which so 
overtops all of central Man- 
hattan? Not so tall, surely. 
This tower of the Metropoli- 
tan Life building rises to the 
height of seven hundred 
feet: indeed, to write with 
meticulousness, one must 
needs say seven hundred feet and three inches. Un- 
fortunately, no record was left us as to the Tower of 
Babel, but surely it was not quite so high as this! 

Nor did Babel look down upon such a confusion 
of tongues as does this sky-piercing tower of New 
York. And instead of, as with Babel, the confusion 
of tongues bringing about a scattering of the people 
to the ends of the earth, it means more and more a 
drawing together of people from the ends of the 
earth. 

The main part of the building rises massively, in 
its light gray stone, story after story, and above this 
the tower, superb in design, continues the upward 

147 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

mounting, rising as if interminably, and at length, 
and foursidedly, coming to an end in a pillar-sup- 
ported octagon surmounted by a lantern of gold. 

It is not only that the building has massiveness 
and size, not only that it harbors daily as many peo- 
ple as would make up the population of many a busy 
town — for the offices collectively have over three thou- 
sand occupants — but that it has positive distinction, 
and splendid beauty. The tower would be deemed 
a thing of beauty in any city of the world, no mat- 
ter how rich in traditions of architecture. 

The clock and its solemn striking, its flashing- 
lights to mark the time noiselessly at night, add to 
the interest of it all. And to mention the size and 
weight of one seemingly little thing, far up there, 
will give an unexpected impression of size and im- 
portance; the apparently little thing being the min- 
ute-hand of the clock, which, in actuality, is seventeen 
feet in length and Aveighs half a ton ! Literally, time 
weighs heavily on the hands — an unusual thing in 
New York, 

The totals of business transacted in this great 
building, by the company which built it, befit the size 
and cost of the structure : and yet, as a contrast, I 
one day came upon a curious fact, which is, that not 
only does the normal and usual business of such a 
company extend to all corners of the country, but 
that it also extends to a totally unexpected quarter 
— to the almshouse dwellers on Blackwell's Island! 
For many a pauper, looking from the Island to this 
superb tower of an insurance company, glistening 

148 



TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES 

in the sun, plainly in view, knows that it represents 
escape from a pauper's grave. 

On the same side of the square, but in the farther 
corner, is Madison Square Garden, designed by Stan- 
ford White; but, as with everything in New York, 
one cannot with certainty write ''is,'' for everything 
that stands is but waiting the usual New York fate, 
and Madison Square Garden, with all its traditions 
of fashion and Horse Shows and great public meet- 
ings, is understood to be doomed. 

It was a superb architectural thought that put this 
building here, in its immense area, with its Spanish 
architecture and its Giralda-like tower and with so 
charming and graceful a Diana over all. In the 
towering beauty of its tawny terra-cotta and brick 
it is a charming thing, and its tower and its arcaded 
sidewalks give a distinctly foreign air. 

The tower was once so high, now overtopped 
though it is by the surrounding buildings, that from 
its summit the Battery could be seen. Well, changes 
come— and although the Battery can no longer be 
seen from the Diana's tower, it may still be seen from 
the far loftier tower of the Metropolitan. 

On the same side of the square is the notable and 
uncompromisingly classic Madison Square Presby- 
terian Church, better known as ** Doctor Parkhurst's 
Church," superbly fine, with its front a triumph of 
restrained color, and Pantheon-like in design. The 
blue in the pediment, the white of the angels, the dull- 
gold tops of the pillars, with blue behind, the splen- 
did granite shafts of the pillars, of a gray that is 

149 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

almost green, the apple-green overlaid with gold in 
the line of the eaves, the yellow and cream — yet all 
so quiet, so harmonious, so unobtrusive! These 
three great buildings on one side of the square are 
so important and so interesting that the eye almost 
fails to see the fine white building of the Appellate 
Court, which would attract notice in any other city. 

The Fifth Avenue Hotel, for so many years an im- 
portant center of New York life, stood facing out 
from the opposite side of the square, where Broad- 
way crosses Fifth Avenue on a long rakish angle. 
Long, very long, is the list of famous folk who were 
guests there, of the politicians who made their head- 
quarters there, of the notable receptions that were 
held there. For a quarter of a century it was pre- 
eminently the most prominent hotel of the city. 

It was in this hotel, and I mention it not so much 
for its imjDortance as for its curious interest, that the 
minister, Burchard, made the alliterative declaration 
about **Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" which de- 
feated Blaine for the Presidency and elected Cleve- 
land. The declaration attracted no apparent atten- 
tion when uttered: the politicians who heard it 
scarcely noticed it : but the newspapers published it 
and it swept like wildfire through the country. 

At the edge of the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, at the 
northern end of the square, is a statue of Farragut, 
on a bench-like base, the base and statue together 
making a united design of unusual effectiveness ; the 
statue being by St. Gaudens and the base by Stanford 
White. 

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THE TOWERS OF MADISON SQUARE 



TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES 

And one remembers tliat the funeral procession of 
Farragut, in 1870, went by this spot. The Admiral 
had died in New Hampshire and his body was brought 
to New York for burial in Woodlawn Cemetery, and 
as it was borne up Fifth Avenue and through Mad- 
ison Square, followed by thousands of troops, and 
the most distinguished civilians, and President Grant 
and members of his Cabinet, a drenching rain was 
steadily falling. 

Madison Square has other statues also, including 
one of Boscoe Conkling and one of Chester Arthur ; 
reminders, these, of a close personal and political 
friendship, bitterly broken by the tragedy of Gar- 
field's death and the succession of Arthur to the Pres- 
idency. 

What a figure Conkling once made ! How power- 
ful he was — and now, almost forgotten. Yet his con- 
test with President Garfield roused the nation to in- 
tense excitement; his holding together of the three 
hundred delegates for Grant, for ballot after ballot, 
day after day, at the National Convention where the 
effort was made to give Grant a third term, roused the 
nation to intense even though reluctant admiration. 
A great figure : but somehow, not much more than his 
superciliousness seems to be perpetuated by this 
bronze and he died from the effects of walking out 
in a terrible March blizzard— just as if it had been the 
Plains instead of the center of Manhattan. 

Over yonder sits Seward, looking a little bored and 
thoughtful on his noisy corner, and with some bronze 
books tucked under his bronze chair. In this square 

151 



THE BOOK OF NEAT YORK 

too is the AYortli monument, a tall memorial over the 
grave of a Avortliy officer, now quite forgotten, who 
fought bravely in a war of which America has al- 
ways been ashamed. 

Xot the least among the attractions of Madison 
Square is an auction establishment, with an unprom- 
ising exterior, which, once entered, leads up and back 
in labyrinthine fascination, with stairs and passages 
and one large room after another. Here at this 
Christie's or Hotel Drouot of New York have been 
held many of the city's most interesting sales of col- 
lections of antiques, paintings and objects of art. 

As night comes on, Madison Square becomes a spe- 
cial haven for derelicts, many of whom sleep on the 
benches until the policeman arouses them by beating 
on their feet ; and as for women derelicts, who would, 
if they could, sleep sitting, the benches are too high 
to permit them to put their feet on the ground. 

And finally, before leaving Madison Square, the 
question comes whether, after all, the widest and 
longest fame, in definite connection with it, has not 
been won by Miss Flora MacFlhnsy of Madison 
Square, whose complaint, so characteristic of the ex- 
travagance of Xew York, was that she had nothing to 
wear. 

A few blocks south of Madison Square is Union 
Square, with Broadway leading into and away from 
it and sweeping curiously along one side. Until re- 
cent years it was one of the greatest centres of New 
York life, but it has been left behind in the city's 
swift advance. 

152 



TWO NOTABLE SQUARES 

Here, where Fourth Avenue reaches Union Square, 
stands an equestrian statue of Washington; a capable, 
excellent statue; on the spot where the General stood 
when he was welcomed by the citizens of New York on 
the great day when he returned, with his army, to 
take possession at the time of the evacuation of the 
city by the British. 

It has frequently been stated that the statue stood 
originally where Cooper Union now stands; but I 
think that misapprehension arose from the fact that 
Fourth Avenue, from Cooper Union to Union Square, 
used to be deemed part of the Bowery, and that this 
statue stood, therefore, at ''the head of the Bowery," 
so that, when ''the head of the Bowery" came to be 
at Cooper Union, the wrong idea likewise came as to 
the location of the statue. The great occasion of 
Washington's reception makes it extremely interest- 
ing to have the precise locality in mind. 

Not far away is a Lafayette, eagerly bending for- 
ward on his pedestal, as if to hasten to the great 
leader whom he so worshiped; as if, indeed, actually 
in the act of motion toward his chief. At least it is 
so as I write, though in this city of change, Lafayette 
may be made to face in some other direction, or 
Washington may be moved away, if it happens to be 
some commissioner's whim or if it should be de- 
manded by some matter of subway construction, in 
this hurrotv of Manhattan. 

The statue of Lafayette brings the memory of a 
ride, one cold and drizzly morning, toward that lonely 
part of France, the Nez de Jobourg, in a tiny dili- 

153 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

gence; for an old Frenchman, a fellow passenger, 
learning that I was an American, told me, with pride, 
that Lafayette went to America to aid in gaining our 
freedom, and then he told me that another French- 
man, Bartholdi, had made for America a great statue 
of Liberty to stand in New York harbor ! Confirma- 
tory knowledge of these things on the part of the 
American delighted the old Norman very much, and 
he was ecstatically happy when I told him that the 
statue of Lafayette himself stood in a square called 
Union Square, in New York City, and that Bartholdi 
was the maker of the statue ! 

Ever, in New York, the human happening is of im- 
portance: and ever there are occurring things dra- 
matic, full of interest. And here, in Union Square, 
there comes the picture of a political meeting, when 
a young orator from the West, who was looked upon 
in that, his first national campaign, as a sort of 
prophet, was to speak here in his own campaign for 
the Presidency. 

It was a rainy night. A huge crowd, with umbrel- 
las raised, massed in front of the stand. After a 
long wait a carriage rounded a corner and came to- 
ward the stand, and beside it, in the rain, came a 
running mass of men. The orator, Bryan, came out 
upon the platform — and every umbrella was instantly 
lowered and not a man moved away, though the rain 
poured down ; all stood there, massed and expectant, 
heedless of the drenching, waiting pathetically for 
the expected words of gold — though I should in this 
case call them silver. But the candidate opened his 

154 



TWO NOTABLE SQUARES 

lips only to ask that patient and drenched gathering 
to excuse him from speaking! — as if to show that not 
every man, given opportunity, is able to rise to the 
opportunity. 

This square used to be a notable place for public 
gatherings and we are told that in April of 1861 over 
one hundred thousand people came here, gathering 
in a patriotic meeting, presided over by the "If any 
man dares to haul down the American flag" Governor, 
John A. Dix. 

At the southwest corner of Union Square, calm and 
thoughtful at a little whirlpool of traffic, is Abraham 
Lincoln in bronze, overlooking what was long deemed 
the most dangerous street crossing in America, 
''Dead Man's Curve," whose perils are now outdone 
on every street and road since the advent of the 
automobile. 

Near this statue, just one block down, at Univer- 
sity Place and 13th Street, there has been set into a 
building a tablet which Lincoln would have read with 
grievous pity and pride: for it tells that from this 
spot, on March 27, 1861, the Ninth Regiment 
''marched away in defense of the Unicto, 850 strong" 
and that on June 11, 1864, "the return home was with 
17 officers and 78 enlisted men." 

Both of these squares, Union and Madison, have as- 
sociation with the most famous name in American 
gastronomy. For, in turn, each of these squares has 
had the world-famous Delmonico's. 

The original Delmonico was, almost a century ago, 
chef and waiter and proprietor of a tiny restaurant 

155 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

on William Street, with chairs, tables, table-ware and 
cutlery of the commonest. But the supreme excel- 
lence of his cooking brought him custom, and he 
moved to a larger place, and then, with his brother, 
to a still larger at William and Beaver Streets (still 
operated under the Delmonico name), and as his sons 
grew to manhood they also joined him, and a place 
was opened on Broadway near the City Hall. Long 
ago, this main establishment was removed to Union 
Square, and then to a building just past the northern 
edge of Madison Square, and at length, years ago, to 
the present locality at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. 

Just before Dickens sailed for home, in 1868, after 
his second visit to the United States, he was given 
a banquet, at the Delmonico 's of that time, by some 
two hundred men of the American press, and the bill 
of fare named such literary dishes as ''creme d'as- 
perges a la Dumas, '* "cotelettes a la Fenimore Coo- 
per," **agneau farci a la Walter Scott," and '4es 
petites Zimballes a la Dickens. ' ' 

Horace Greeley presided, and told how, many years 
before, he had chosen, to print in his first weekly 
newspaper, a short story, that he had noticed in an 
English periodical, written by an unknown author 
who signed the name '^Boz!"— the story being ''A 
Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle." 

It was at this dinner that Dickens made his famous 
declaration that, on his arrival in England, he would, 
in his o^vn English periodical, ''manfully, promptly, 
and plainly in my own person," tell of the ''gigantic 
changes" that he had seen, and that he would also 

156 



TWO NOTABLE SQUAEES 

tell that, ''wherever I have been, in the smallest place 
equally with the largest, I have been received with un- 
surpassed politeness, delicacy, sweet-temper, hospi- 
tality and consideration," and that "this testimony, 
so long as my descendants have any legal right m my 
books, I shall cause to be published, as an appendix, 
to every copy of those two books of mine m which i 
have referred to America. And this I will do, be- 
cause I regard it as an act of plain justice and honor 

So Dickens ''ate crow," and a very large dish of it, 
at that dinner, though it was not on the bill of fare- 
not even under the disguise of "corbeau a la Dick- 
ens." 




157 



CHAPTER XIII 



GRAMEECY AND STUYVESANT AND OLD CHELSEA 




^ 



EW YORK architects and build- 
ers reveled for years in the 
building of humdrum, high- 
stoop houses: many and many 
a street is still double-lined 
with their monotony: and yet, 
that these commonplace build- 
ings may be made into build- 
ings of beauty, that the com- 
monplace may be changed into 
charm, has been shown on East 19th Street. For 
that street, for a short distance east of Irving 
Place, has been delightfully made into a studio 
street by the intelligent cooperation of artists and 
architects, who have taken in hand the prosaic old 
houses that have long stood there — fortunately, not 
the really narrow and mean houses of which the city 
has so many — and have altered them by taking away 
the steppy stoops, by setting down the doors to the 
level of the sidewalks, by adding little wrought iron 
balconies, with flower-boxes, by changing roof -lines, 
by putting on gables of old Dutch shape, by using red 
tiles, by differently grouping the windows, by chang- 

158 



GEAMEECY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA 

ing the glass to smaller panes, by the use of pictur- 
esquely heavy sash, by using such wood-work colors, 
quiet but at the same time noticeable, as verdigris 
green, by putting brass knockers on the doors. Such 
things have been done with comparatively small ex- 
pense; nothing compared with tearing down the old 
houses and putting up new ; and the resultant effect, 
with these made-over buildings, is a street of repose 
and good living and distinction and charm. On one 
of the roofs are a couple of storks, and, absurd though 
the idea may seem, the effect is not in the least ab- 
surd but very pictorial. 

That artists and others who love the picturesque in 
Europe, refer to this street as being "like a bit of 
Paris," *'a bit of London," ''a bit of Amsterdam"— 
each one reminded of some place which holds pictur- 
esque memories for him— represents the most cordial 
appreciation of the efforts of those who carried out 
the alterations. It is really something much better 
than a bit of Amsterdam or London or Paris, it is an 
expression of American blood and feeling, here in 
New York, and its importance lies in its showing how 
easily some miles of at present humdrum houses could 
be altered to some form of excellent good looks. ^ 

As if with intention, those who chose this particular 
section for picturesque living chose one that lies be- 
tween picturesque old Gramercy Park and the still 
picturesque Stuyvesant Square, and near to both. 

To many, even of those who know their New York 
well, Gramercy Park is a place that is hard to find; 
it seems not to be just where you expect it to be : and 

159 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

yet it is eminently central and convenient, between 
Fourth and Third Avenues, with its north side 21st 
Street and its south side 20th Street, and with Irving 
Place leading to it from below and Lexington Ave- 
nue from above. 

It is a pleasant park, a tiny little park, a charming 
little park, an attractive, felicitous, captivating little 
park, a park of which it may be said that it is one of 
the things that still stand for good old New York 
living and at the same time that it is remindful of 
many a little park in England. 

Here, in former days, dwelt David Dudley Field and 
Cyrus W. Field, John Bigelow and Nicholas Fish and 
the Coopers and Stanford White; and most of the 
old houses still remain. It is not that they are, in- 
dividually, models for other buildings, but that as a 
whole they give a sense of the comfortable and worth 
while. 

The park, as a small residence section, buttressed 
by a little residential section in the streets immedi- 
ately around it, is notable, close as it is to Broadway, 
to busy 23d Street, to the rush of Third Avenue. It 
is reposeful. In that, I think, lies its chief merit. 
It is a quiet little pool, in the heart of swift currents 
of humanity and business. 

What has kept it a place apart has been, princi- 
pally, the greenery of its central space, its trees, its 
shrubs, its flowers, its grass. For all this space is 
enclosed within an iron fence, and only the o^vners of 
property facing into the park have keys, and thus 
strict privacy is assured in its walks and paths, and 

160 



GTBAMEECY, STUYYESANT, OLD CHELSEA 

a few nursemaids and children are usually, in pleasant 
weather, to be seen there, happy and cheerful. This 
shutting off into exclusiveness of the central space is 
not only successful in giving and maintaining the air 
of charming seclusion, but it has kept the park from 
being overrun by tenement dwellers: a tenement sec- 
tion is within a few minutes ' walk, and the park would 
tempt to general gregarious gathering were there 
benches there and a space for public playing. 

Naturally, clubs were drawn into this quiet little 
eddy. The Princeton Club was attracted to the oc- 
cupancy of a fine old house on the northern side. On 
the southern side, at 15, is the mansion that was 
the home of Samuel J. Tilden, lawyer, governor, al- 
most President, and the building was acquired by the 
National Arts Club ; it is a mansion of huge size, built 
in a style of chocolate-colored grandeur, a large-wm- 
dowed* house, with rooms cavernously large. Next 
door, at 16, is the Players' Club, also a large building, 
of comfort and spaciousness, the fine gift of the great 
Edwin Booth, who gave everything freely, house and 
furniture, merely reserving one room for his own use 
and one for Lawrence Barrett— the close friendship 
of these two actors, who might so easily have been 
unfriendly rivals, being one of the treasured mem- 
ories of the American stage. Booth's room is pre- 
served as it was on the day he died, even to the book 
which he was reading, which is open at the page where 
he left it when death came. 

Gramercy Park, in spite of the fact that none of 
its houses is very old, gives an impression of pleasant 

161 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

old-timeness ; or, perhaps one might say that it looks, 
not old, but middle-aged. As a matter of fact, it was 
not laid out and set aside as a park until the early 
1830 's. 

It is a pleasantly reposeful spot for which New York 
ought to be — and is — thankful : and I like to think of it 
as owing its name, in some never to be explained way, 
to this idea of thankfulness. The origin of the name 
has been laboriously traced, and perhaps but fanci- 
fully, to "Krom-merssche," meaning "Crooked little 
swamp '^; but I should like to think of it as being the 
delightful "Gramercy" of the olden time and of 
Spenser and Walter Scott, meaning not only thanks, 
but ''grandmerci," many and unusual thanks! I 
have heard the peasants in out of the way corners of 
ancient Normandy use the old time syllables with de- 
lightfully prolonged accent on the first — pronounced, 
I need not say, *'grah-mer-cy" — and I like to think 
that the long-ago use of the word in New York may 
have come from some picturesque connection with the 
picturesque Huguenots who refugeed here, or perhaps 
from some of the French who came in such numbers at 
the time of the Revolution. Of course, the laboriously 
made out **Krom-merssche'' derivation would also be 
interesting from its connection with the picturesque 
Dutch; but the Dutch gave name to another old- 
fashioned park, Stuyvesant Square, just a few blocks 
from Gramercy, so there would be no partiality in 
giving Gramercy to the French and leaving Stuyves- 
ant with its derivation from the domain of the worthy 
Petrus. 

162 



GRAMERCY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA 

Stuyvesant Square is a large area, consisting of 
two separate sections divided by Second Avenue, a 
little north of Mth Street, each section enclosed within 
high iron fencing, and unusually thick with trees and 
shrubs. Far down town though this now is, and over 
in the midst of the thronging East Side, it is one of 
the peaceful places in New York. Like Gramercy, it 
is restful and quiet, except for the gay twitter of birds, 
and this twitter itself seems to add to the sense of 
quietness and rest; and yet, though an attractive 
place, it is without the quite unusual charm of Gra- 
mercy. 

Facing the south-west corner are some buildings of 
dullish red, looking out into the greenery; Quaker 
buildings these, already growing old, for they were 
built in 1860; and they are built with much of the 
old-fashioned prim Quaker restraint such as one finds 
with the old Quaker meeting-houses in the vicinity of 
Philadelphia. The dull red of the brick, the white of 
the stone trimmings, the white of the slender pillared 
prim porticoes with their prim tops, the brown shut- 
ters, the window shades of Quaker drab, all unite to 
make a primly pleasant impression. 

Adjoining, and as if for a contrast to Quaker sim- 
plicity, is the brown mass of St. George's Church, 
long the most fashionable Episcopalian Church, even 
after fashion so long ago deserted this old Knicker- 
bocker center. It is a great brown structure, with 
two towers indicated but never built up. It is a mass- 
ive-fronted building of generous and dark interior. 
Its pulpit at the front of the altar is elaborately 

163 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

designed and carved, and is inscribed with the state- 
ment that it was put up by the congregation in mem- 
ory of J. P. Morgan, who was born in Connecticut 
in 1837 and who died in Eome in 1913. Such a man, 
a veritable emperor of finance that he was, actually 
more powerful, more of a world force, than by far the 
greater number of those who wore the Roman purple, 
would have felt his fancy titillated — for he was a man 
of imagination — could he have known that it was in 
once imperial Rome that he was to end his financially 
imperial days. But I have seen him in this church, 
gravely walking down the aisle and gravely passing 
the collection plate to other men of wealth, thus de- 
manding money of them even on the Sabbath; and 
somehow there came the impression of Wall Street 
rather than of Rome. 

The square used to be a center of wealthy and cul- 
tivated life, but wealth and fashion have left; they 
would not stay over here, east of Third Avenue. 

Forming, in a general way, across Manhattan from 
side to side, a line of old-fashioned neighborhoods 
which still retain their old-fashioned charm, it seems 
as if Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park come nat- 
urally into association with attractive old Chelsea. 
And always, with Chelsea, there comes prominently to 
mind its association with Santa Claus : for, incongru- 
ous though it seems for any part of this ultra-modern 
city to be associated with so old-fashioned a belief, so 
quaint and old-fashioned a fantasy as that concerning 
good old Santa Claus, New York has precisely that 
association, because of Chelsea: for it was a New 

164 




GRAMERCY PARK AND THE PLAYERS CLUB 



GRAMERCY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA 

Yorker, a dweller here, who wrote those preeminently 
Santa Clausish lines beginning, " 'Twas the night be- 
fore Christmas." 

In New York, Santa Clans must go down a pipe 
in a kitchenette, or come up a furnace flue, or struggle 
with hot-water pipes, or be broiled with steam. It is 
not an encouraging city for old-time Christmas tradi- 
tions. It is not a place for stockings by the fireplace. 
And so it seems astonishing that any New Yorker 
should have been inspired to write these lines. And 
then one remembers that, after all, it was in the house- 
living days of New York, before the apartment days, 
that the verses were written ; although they are so gen- 
erally familiar, and give so entirely modern an im- 
pression, that one at first takes it for granted that 
they are of recent origin. As a matter of fact, they 
were written by a man who lived in New York a cen- 
tury ago. And he lived in this section, to which even 
yet tenements have not come. 

Old Chelsea, once Chelsea Village, still retaining 
much of its old-time comfortable aspect, its pictur- 
esqueness, is in the vicinity of 23rd Street and the 
North River. And he who would know New York 
must, from the first, know that the city is divided, not 
officially but none the less surely, into a great number 
of divisions, such as Yorkville, Poverty Hollow, Mur- 
ray Hill, Hell's Kitchen, Sunken Village, Penitentiary 
Row, Manhattanville, Harlem, Battle Row, Corcor- 
an 's Roost, Greenwich Village and Chelsea. 

The author of the Santa Claus verse was Clement 
C. Moore, son of Bishop Moore, and he inherited from 

165 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

his father most of the great area of Chelsea, and gave, 
or leased forever without rent, a large part of his 
possessions to a theological seminary, which put up 
interesting college buildings in English stjde, and ce- 
mented jagged glass on the tops of stone walls to dis- 
courage trespassers — also in English style! — and on 
the whole gave such an atmosphere of peace and 
charm as to make Chelsea quite remindful of some 
pleasant ecclesiastical village of England. Delightful 
folk came to live in the vicinity of the college buildings 
and the professors ; and even yet, in spite of the north- 
ward sweep of commerce and business, this section re- 
mains an oasis of charm. 

The first house in the Chelsea neighborhood was 
built by Captain Thomas Clarke, about 1750, and the 
name of Chelsea seems to have been reminiscent of old 
Chelsea by the Thames, in England. Clarke's house 
was burned when he was on his deathbed, and he was 
carried away from it to die, but his widow bravely re- 
built on the same spot; but this second house also 
long ago disappeared. 

During the Eevolution the widow and her two 
daughters, frankly loyal to England, feared injury 
from the Americans during the brief time that the 
Continentals held New York, and there is a pretty 
story about General Washington himself hearing of 
this and riding over in person, one day, to assure the 
ladies of full safety. Indeed, our American George 
could be a very courtly gentleman when he chose. 

A vague story has also come down that a British 
frigate which had been doing target practice turned 

166 



GEAMEECY, STUYVESANT, OLD CHELSEA 

its guns toward the Americans when Washington's 
party was seen and that a cannon ball actually 
crashed into the Clarke house ; but this story seems to 
have no basis except that of legendary interest. 

The property passed from the possession of the 
Clarkes to that of Bishop Moore about the year 1800, 
but it still kept its name of Chelsea. 

And not only was the son of the bishop the author 
of what may fairly be termed the classic of child- 
hood, but he was also author of so utterly different a 
work, so absolutely unchildlike in its appeal, as a 
Hebrew lexicon! And the suggestion amusingly 
comes that if this classic of erudition could be as 
widely known as the classic of childhood, converse 
would be easy with the race who are more in evidence 
than any other of the many races of Manhattan ! 



ii^V-1- 




167 



CHAPTER XIV 



UP FIFTH TO FOETY-SECOND 




IIFTH Avenue marches off su- 
perbly from a noble gateway, an 
arch placed like a gateway at its 
lower end, where the avenue 
leads away from Washington 
Square. It is a distinguished 
arch, an arch of proportion, of 
grace, of dignity, of beauty, it is 
an arch of gray stone, and it 
rises effectively from a sweep of 
gray asphalt pavement, with the 
""^ ~" soft greenery of grass and the 

swaying green of great old trees close by, and it rises 
against a sedate background of the mellow red of 
old mansions. 

It is not a large arch. It was inspired by the Arc 
de Triomphe of Paris just as that had been inspired 
by the arches of Rome; indeed this is far more like 
the arch of Titus than like the Parisian arch. 

At each corner of Fifth Avenue, and facing to- 
ward the arch, is a house of large and generous size, 
of ample and fine proportions; each is of mellowed 
brick, each has great wistarias, drooping clusters 

168 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

of purple over its balconies, each has a garden 
nooked behind a high brick wall, "a garden circum- 
mured with brick, ' ' each has the smoothest of narrow 
lawns and each is bright with flowering shrubs. If 
houses were human these might be twins, so delight- 
fully alike they are in general air and aspect. 

Fifth Avenue is a wonderful avenue, in its great 
straight length of mile on mile, in its setting forth 
of much of the very best that New York can offer, of 
people and homes and churches and clubs and hotels 
and places of business and parks, and in its posses- 
sion of the finest of American museums. For many 
years an avenue of homes, it now has as many busi- 
ness establishments as homes, and it still retains its 
leadership among American avenues. 

A white-fronted hotel, foreign-looking and distin- 
guished, just a little above the square, keeps in mind 
the name of Brevoort, the man who long ago owned 
acres and acres of land hereabouts, his estate extend- 
ing even beyond Broadway. He was born thirty 
years before the Revolution and lived for thirty years 
after the beginning of the War of 1812, and for his 
almost full century of life left the memory of one 
notable achievement : the preventing, by a bitter legal 
fight, of the cutting of 11th Street through his prop- 
erty, from Broadway to Fourth Avenue, his objection 
being that it would destroy a favorite tree — and 
hence the still unbroken space immediately adjoining 
Grace Church on the north. 

The junction of Fifth Avenue and 9th Street is of 
varied and unusual interest. At the south-east 

169 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

corner is a rather narrow house, of three stories and 
a high basement, a house of red brick with imitation 
Venetian windows; not at all a distinguished house, 
yet here it was that Mark Twain came, to spend the 
closing years of his life. 

It has always seemed to me that the explanation 
of his choosing this home, whence he could look out 
upon great currents of human travel, was the feeling, 
perhaps subconscious, that Fifth Avenue itself was a 
sort of landward Mississippi Eiver, here in the East. I 
remember that on pleasant spring evenings he would 
stand at the top of his front steps, clad in the fa- 
mous white suit with which he won such attention in 
England, smoking his cigar (inveterate smoker that 
he was, he loved to say that he had made it a life- 
long rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a 
time!) and looking out thoughtfully at the currents 
of life, of the passing people and vehicles. 

Across the street, at the north-east corner, lived 
old General Sickles, long surviving the war that had 
made him famous, and maintaining to the last his 
tulip bed as if it were a battalion holding a desper- 
ate position; and indeed it required determination 
and vigilance to hold those tulip lines ! Bluff old sol- 
dier that he was, his friends liked to remember that 
when he had lost his leg at Gettysburg, and his faith- 
ful negro body-servant blubbered about it, there 
came a curt admonition, with the words: "Don't you 
see you'll only have one boot to polish after this!" 

It gives the 9th Street junction a still further inter- 
est, and an interest of fiction instead of fact, that 

170 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

the square-fronted house at the north-west corner 
was the house of Van Bibber's burglar — thus bring- 
ing freshly to mind the memory of that kindly club- 
man, the delightful conception of the early career of 
Richard Harding Davis. 

At 10th Street is the Church of the Ascension, built 
of a rough and reddish stone, and with a square tower 
rising above its unpretentious but dignified front. A 
stone pavement is about it and there are privet 
bushes of great size, and the church is finely open 
daily, as a number of New York churches are, for 
rest, meditation and prayer ; and at services the seats 
are free. 

Inside, the interest goes at once to a great painting 
behind the altar, a painting of the Ascension by John 
LaFarge, occupying the entire end of the nave and 
rismg with curving top to the ceiling. It is in soft 
blues, in tawny colorings with touches of subdued 
rose, and shows some two-score figures of angels and 
disciples and friends, and on the whole is a notable 
thing. 

The interior of the church is effective. It is a 
lesson in good taste. It is most satisfactorily a 
churchly church, in its Gothic style, and with its stone 
floor, its stone columns on either side, its black and 
ancient-looking oak, its stained glass, already finely 
mellowing. As the organ softly sounds, a golden 
light streams in through the yellow glass of the high 
windows over the doorway, and you feel, in that dim 
religious light, as if you are infinite miles away from 
the busy city. This is a church by Upjohn, the archi- 

171 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

tect of Trinity, a man of very real ability, who did so 
much to give ecclesiastical buildings of distinction to 
the city. 

West 10th Street, for the block between Fifth and 
Sixth Avenues, is an interesting old New York 
street, an almost romantic street, a street mainly of 
individual houses instead of flats or apartments : and 
here still stands an old-fashioned block of studio 
buildings, the studios of the ''Old Masters" of New 
York, the studios of men who cheerfully painted and 
struggled for fame in the long ago, and whose pic- 
tures now sell from, say, from two to twenty thou- 
sand dollars each. Here, in Chase's studio, Car- 
mencita danced, as she dances forever in Sargent's 
painting in the gallery of the Luxembourg, in Paris : 
here were gay and happy times : but these ' ' Old Mas- 
ters" are dead, and the footsteps of a new generation 
of artists sound upon the red-tiled floors. 

That these old studio fronts are generously broad 
is a chief source of their comfortable cheerfulness of 
aspect; and this is remindful that the cause, more 
than any other, of a certain meagerness, a cramped 
uncomfortableness, which mark many miles of New 
York buildings, is that some one discovered how to 
build flats which, by dividing the frontage of a New 
York lot, gave to each family the width of half a lot 
— which was admirable for land and building specu- 
lators but the reverse of admirable for the city's 
looks. 

At 11th Street and Fifth Avenue is another Up- 
john church, the First Presbyterian, a church not un- 

172 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

like that of the Ascension, but with a broader and 
larger interior, with side galleries and a groined roof. 
This church occupies an entire block and has there- 
fore much of an air of spaciousness, and there is much 
of greenery roundabout, and there is a privet hedge 
behind a Gothic iron fence, and above the church 
rises a square Gothic tower. It is of rough stone, 
dark and reddish, and has in its outward aspect a 
little more of elaborateness of stone detail than has 
its sister church on the corner below. 

It should not be forgotten that it was on the stone 
ledge of the base of the iron fence in front of this 
church that George William Curtis, in *'Prue and I," 
placed the old apple-woman from whom the daily 
apple was bought, and whose basket was so distress- 
ingly overturned when the man was eagerly gazing 
at the pretty girl passing in the carriage! — for of 
such light things, with their sweet and wholesome 
flavor, was the literature of half and three-quarters 
of a century ago made ! 

On past 14th Street, with towering business blocks 
on either side, Fifth Avenue marches, and straight as 
an arrow through Madison Square, here crossing 
Broadway and aiming directly on to a far-distant 
northward. 

At East 29th Street one's eyes are drawn aside by 
the greenery and charm of the Little Church Around 
the Corner, so interesting in its name and its appear- 
ance and its setting, so delightfully unexpected as a 
bit of downtown New York landscape, so associated 
witli, fiction that seems as real as fact and with fact 

173 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

that has all the interest of fiction. It is hut half a 
block from the avenue. 

The marriages that have taken place at what was 
so long looked upon as New York's Gretna Green 
represent romance illimitable; and one thinks first 
of the delightful marriage at which the always lika- 
ble Van Bibber was the deus ex machina, while he 
sent the angry brother off on a wildgoose chase to 
Chicago— and afterwards was mildly sorry that he 
had made it farther than Jersey City. 

Weddings at all hours so established the pleasant 
fame of this church that funerals seem almost incon- 
gruous ; and yet it was a funeral through which the 
fame of this church of marriages began, the funeral 
of George Holland ; nor can one forget that grim lit- 
tle story of Brander Matthews' in which he tells of 
the funeral of an actor, while the woman he was to 
have married sat unnoticed by the door in the most 
hopeless of all agony; and perhaps that story came to 
him from noticing how like the drop scene of a theater 
this church appears, in its long stretched-out but 
shallow surroundings. The long nave of the church 
is even parallel with the sidewalk, as if in an effort 
to accentuate the drop scene effect. 

The formal name, if one must have formality, is 
the Church of the Transfiguration, but its name of 
the Little Church Around the Corner is that by which 
it is always lovingly known. 

George Holland, an actor of ''useful career and 
unblemished character," to use the words of Joseph 
Jefferson, his close friend, died at the age of eighty, 

174 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

and Jefferson, accompanied by Holland's son, went 
to the minister of the church on Fifth Avenue that 
was attended by Holland's sister, to arrange for the 
funeral. 

The minister named the time; but then, learning 
from a remark dropped by Jefferson that Holland 
had been an actor, he absolutely declined to have the 
service at his church ! 

Jefferson was frankly shocked by this refusal, 
whereupon the minister carelessly remarked that 
''there was a little church around the corner where 
you might get it done. " ' ' Might get it done ! ' ' We 
have Jefferson's own statement that those were the 
minister's words. 

And Jefferson, fine man as well as fine actor that 
he was, was equal to the occasion. ''If this be so, 
then God bless the Little Church Around the Cor- 
ner ! " he said, thus giving the church its lovable name 
by the swift adoption of the minister's flippantly 
meant phrase. Thus christened, the name was affec- 
tionately seized upon by Jefferson's friends and by 
the public. No church in the world has been more 
fondly referred to. 

From Holland's funeral there have come to be a 
long, long line, not only of funerals but in particular 
of weddings, and its reputation long ago made it the 
most romantic pilgrimage spot in New York. 

The ivy-clad little crowded clump of buildings nes- 
tles oddly away among the tall business structures 
closely surrounding it. It is of brick, with sharp- 
pointed gables. Its center square tower, prettily vil- 

175 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

lage-like, runs up to a cross-tipped and pyramidal 
roof. The church buildings are very low set, almost 
as if seeking seclusion behind the hedge that borders 
the sidewalk. All is pleasantly Gothic in design. 
The windows are narrow and lancet like. The in- 
terior of the church is longer than would be expected 
from the outside; it is dusky and low, with almost 
the impression of the roof being close upon you. 

Outside there are grass and shrubs within the nar- 
row little space and even some trees ! And there is, 
of all thmgs for central New York, a lych-gate, which 
gives an air as of peacefully setting the church apart 
from the street. 

Business long ago invaded Fifth Avenue, but now 
it has conquered great sections from down near its 
beginning to far up toward Central Park. Nor are 
the businesses of the kind which first appeared here 
on this avenue, so long exclusive. At first they were 
expensive establishments for the sale of jewelry and 
furs, hats and flowers, china, costumes, paintings, en- 
gravings; and there were expensive hotels and res- 
taurants of world-wide fame. And these are still 
here ; the most expensive and exclusive of shops, and 
the most exclusive of dining places : but there is also 
now an admixture of shops that sell poorer and 
cheaper things, and of restaurants that are neither 
expensive nor fashionable. 

Most of all, a change has come through the mass- 
ing in this vicinity of garment makers, who have rec- 
ognized the importance of a Fifth Avenue, or near 
Fifth Avenue, address, as a business asset, and have 

176 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

therefore moved into this region. At the noon hour, 
now, the sidewalks of a great part of the avenue, 
below 34th Street, are packed, for blocks, solid with 
foreign-faced garment workers; all men, all quiet 
and orderly, almost all dressed in black, and all 
standing here or softly shuffling about getting a little 
sun and air before returning* to take up the after- 
noon's work. These men, who swarm so thickly on 
weekdays, vanish as evening comes, and on Sundays 
are not in evidence at all. 

And on Sunday mornings Americans come back 
here! You see again the American faces that you 
thought had disappeared from the New York side- 
walks! And you see Americans without foreigners. 
And not merely in the motor-cars; as a matter of 
fact the motors on Sunday are largely from New Jer- 
sey, over for a safe city spin, or even from Connecti- 
cut ; but the sidewalks from, say, 34th Street to Cen- 
tral Park are thronged with Americans. 

The high silk hat, too, polished to dazzling bright- 
ness, glowing, resplendent, is again brought out from 
the hiding place into v^^hich for the rest of the week 
it is thrust, and goes proudly along as of old. And 
under the silk hats you may pick out the face of this 
or that well-known New Yorker, this or that busi- 
ness man or lawyer. There are New Yorkers who 
know each other ! You see them bowing and smiling 
at each other in greeting. This is not the case on 
other days of the week, for in general New Yorkers 
are strangers to those who pass them by. 

One day I saw twenty-five thousand strikers, mostly 

177 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

garment workers, marching up Fifth Avenue. 
There was not an American face in the entire twenty- 
five thousand. It was an object lesson as to whose 
are the hands into which we are throwing the con- 
trol of our country. The faces wore an expression 
of triumphant sullenness. It was as if they were 
warning Americans — as in very truth they were. 
And the crowds massed to watch them vv'ore mainly 
composed of men and women and children of their 
own class, immediate friends and sympathizers. 
And I noticed that with the marchers and spectators 
alike, the average physical size was quite beneath 
that of American citizens of the times now vanish- 
ing. The entire throng were frankly undersized, so 
markedly that any one reaching an average Ameri- 
can height was noticeable. 

And not only were they undersized, not only were 
there no American faces, but the tunes to which they 
marched — for they had a number of bands — were 
not only not American but were almost all of revolu- 
tionary tendency. There was no Irishman marching 
— but "The Wearing of the Green" was a favorite 
tune. There was not a single Frenchman — but far 
more than any other tune the bands vied with each 
other in the "Marseillaise." 

Unexpectedly and very pleasantly, in much of New 
York, and notably on Fifth Avenue, one sees flowers 
and greenery and vines in front of the shops, in lines 
along the sidewalks, in rows above the front-doors, 
in dots, in singles, in pots, even in hedges, giving in 
all a pleasurable sense of sweetness and color; quite 

178 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

Parisian, I was going to say, only in this regard really 
better than with the shops of Paris; more like the 
greenery showing on the shop-fronts of London. 

And to add to the homelikeness that still lingers, 
with the wealthy homes, there is often an unexpected 
bit of greenery over a wall, and even now and then 
the homely touch of a clothesline full of clothes. 

The big hotel at 34th Street, the Waldorf-Astoria, 
which has probably been more talked about than any 
other hotel in the world, is still a place where, if you 
will but sit down in the lobby, your friends from any 
corner of the world will in time appear. For every- 
body still seems to drift in here, even if but to see 
and be seen, even though fickle New York never keeps 
any hotel on an exclusive pinnacle, but is always 
reaching out for something new and more expensive 
— and with hotels, as with everything else, the new 
and more expensive is always given when looked for ! 
And the greatest hotels rival one another in vast 
number of rooms and vast number of guests and vast 
number of. servants: the figures offered seem like 
fantastic dreams of incredible quantities. And with 
all this and in spite of all this, there have been times 
in recent years, when every hotel in Manhattan was 
literally full and when those who could not find room 
had to go to sleep, not merely over to Brooklyn, but 
to towns in New Jersey; even Philadelphia claims 
part of this overflow of visitors, who would take an 
early train to New York each morning and return 
each night. 

Biggest of all the New York hotels — until some new 

179 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

one shall outdo it ! — will be that of the Pennsylvania 
Railroad, put up opposite its station by the railroad 
itself because of the hesitation of outside capital as 
to buying a hotel site beneath which is a tunnel 
through which trains are forever to go: and this 
hotel, with its two thousand rooms and a private bath 
for every room, is not only to lead New York but, 
of course, the entire world. 

The big brown hotel at 34th Street, with its tea 
rooms, its ''Peacock Row," its permeative touch of 
wellrgowned femininity, has been the main influence 
in bringing about an interesting change. For it used 
to be that a woman at a hotel was condemned to se- 
clusion and monotony. Only a few years ago, the 
"Ladies' Parlor," on the second floor of all hotels, 
was a thing of gloom and dread. It was stern and 
solemn and severe. It was scant of light and air. 
Its atmosphere was hushed. Its voices were always 
low. Its furniture was soberly upholstered. No chair 
was ever to be moved. To go to a hotel was, for a 
woman, matter for penitence. She was a flower to 
blush unseen. But now it is understood that there 
must be brightness and music and gayety and lights 
for women as well as for men : and already this fact 
is as generally recognized as if it had always been 
self-evident. Nowadays, the revel of woman's 
beauty, the glitter of woman's gems, the sheen and 
glimmer of charming fashions, are openly a pleasure 
to the eye, in any good hotel. 

Busy and thronging with life is the Avenue at 34th 
Street, but even more thronging, more full of the 

180 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

splendor of life, is the corner of 42d Street, which 
seems, on the whole, to mark the crest of present-day 
New York life. 

It is a wonderful sight that one sees, on a pleasant 
sunny day, from the terrace in front of the great 
library building at this corner. Four mighty 
streams of traffic, east and west on 42d Street and 
north and south on Fifth Avenue converge and meet 
and pass here. Within the ten busiest hours of the 
day there pass this corner, so say those whose busi- 
ness it has been to count, 18,800 vehicles, the great 
majority being motor vehicles, and 113,780 pedestri- 
ans: making an average of one vehicle every two 
seconds and of three pedestrians a second: but fig- 
ures even such as these seem small when compared 
with the immense sight of the immense traffic itself, 
moving on in orderly lines; and from time to time 
halted, in a few moments, into lines of motor-cars 
stretching up and down the avenue for blocks. 

And it is not merely the mass, the numbers, the 
movement, the busy lif^ of the scene; it is opulence 
and glitter, it is splendor and beauty and wealth. 
One does not on this corner think of the tenements or 
poverty! On this corner it would seem even more 
absurd than on Wall Street to remember that the 
entire island of Manhattan was jjurchased from the 
Indians for some beads and ribbons of the value of 
twenty-four dollars ! The golden sunlight glows and 
glitters on a golden street. The very heart of the 
proud city is seen, ''That great city, that was 
clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and 

181 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

decked with gold, and precious stones, and 
pearls!" 

Here at 42d and Fifth, there was built, in the mid- 
dle of the last century, a building which, though it 
burned down shortly after its erection, is still remem- 
bered, as a memorable thing, by this city which so 
readily forgets. For it was the Crystal Palace. It 
stood not precisely at the corner, but on the space 
behind the present library building, and it was 
deemed one of the wonders of the world: and this, 
and its being still kept in memory, was much more 
from its having contained thirty-nine thousand 
square feet of glass than because it was built as a 
great exposition building or because it displayed, 
among many other things, the first important collec- 
tion of painting and sculpture ever seen in the United 
States. 

Paintings, and particularly those by famous art- 
ists, have become one of the extravagant items of 
New York life ; this line of expensiveness has devel- 
oped within the last hundred years, although even a 
century ago there were sums paid that were quite 
high for that period. In 1811 a certain Michael Paff 
opened a gallery at 208 Broadway for the exhibition 
of "a collection of original paintings," and there he 
exhibited what, whether originals or not, would now 
be deemed priceless examples of Teniers, Rubens, 
Vandyck and Wouvermans. I do not know what 
prices he obtained for most of his pictures, but a 
Wouvermans was offered for $2,000. Paff an- 
nounced that he had been upwards of ten years col- 

182 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND 

lecting Ms pictures ''and fitting them up in superior 
style." Likely enough, some of his paintings are 
now in the Metropolitan Museum or in prized pri- 
vate possession, and one can only hope that his om- 
inous phrase of ''fitting them up" meant nothing 
serious. 

At the corner of 42nd Street stands the Public 
Library; a great and noble building, occupying the 
space from 42nd to 40th Streets, and fronting Fifth 
Avenue with splendid pillared and terraced effective- 
ness, and with tall Venetian masts set charmingly in 
front. A building, this, which would be an honor to 
any country or any time ; and, as it is always the case 
that in New York the cost of anything is held im- 
portant, it may be said that the great and beautiful 
structure cost, exclusive of the cost of the land, nine 
millions of dollars. But it is more important to say 
that the building holds more than eight hundred 
thousand volumes, and innumerable manuscripts, in 
addition to the vast number of volumes contained in 
its many branch libraries scattered throughout the 
city. 

Within, the atmosphere is of restful studiousness, 
and the great central reading room, the impressive 
length of corridors, the admirable service, the rows 
on rows of books, the galleries of prints and engrav- 
ings and paintings, unite to make it notable among 
the libraries of the world; a noble building, nobly 
used. 

Its picture gallery is comparatively little known, 
but, though not large, it contains some extremely 

183 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

interesting examples, and especially of American 

artists 

Here is that Washington, by Gilbert Stuart, which 
was the proud possession of Alexander Hamilton: a 
Washington holding a scroll and a sword, with a 
background of the sea and ships: a highly dignified 
Washington of lace ruffles and black velvet— and it 
is pleasant to remember somebody's felicitous com- 
ment that it was fortunate that in Washington's time 
a painter existed who was able to hand him down 
to posterity as the fine gentleman that he was. 

There are in existence a number of Gilbert Stu- 
art's Washingtons. Stuart had painted abroad, 
among many notables, George the Third and the 
prince who later became George the Fourth, but he 
gave up his English career for the purpose of coming 
back to America to paint a far greater George than 
either of those royal ones; and this Washington, here 
in the library, is believed to have been a gift to Ham- 
ilton from Washington himself. And one likes to 
remember that quaintly wise and quaintly humorous 
declaration by Mark Twain, that if George Washmg- 
ton should rise from the dead and should not resem- 
ble the portraits by Stuart, he would be denounced 
as an impostor ! -u „ 

Two other of the interesting portraits are by an 
exceptionally famous New Yorker who was not at all 
famous as a painter, S. F. B. Morse. He studied un- 
der the great Benjamin West in England, and came 
back to America determined to win fame as a painter 
of portraits. And he had excellent sitters and made 

184 



UP FIFTH TO FORTY-SECOND - 

numerous pictures. And then he made one of the 
most amazing of changes ; for he quitted art and in- 
vented the telegraph. And it is recorded that this 
New Yorker (he was not born here, but, typical New 
Yorker that he was, came here to live and become 
famous) received more medals and honors and deco- 
rations from foreign governments than were ever 
given to any other American. 

Here is Morse's portrait of Fitz-Greene Halleck, 
and it is interesting to see what the famous New 
York poet looked like, in the eyes of the inventor 
of the telegraph, for Halleck wears a snuff-colored 
coat with a high velvet collar, he is a ruddy-faced, 
black-haired man of perhaps forty, and he smiles a 
little fatuously from the canvas. 

Here, too, is Morse's portrait of Lafayette, painted 
when the distinguished Frenchman was in America 
in 1825. It is an excellent bit of work, presenting 
Lafayette as a great-eyed, long-nosed, long-faced, 
highly likable man, with high-set eyebrows and nar- 
rowish forehead, with choker collar and ruffled shirt, 
dressed in black, with a dark red cloak. The por- 
trait is an example of how one's private griefs must 
often be submerged in one's work: for Morse's wife 
was taken ill in New Haven when this portrait was 
but half done, and he hurried to her bedside, and she 
died, and then he returned to the completion of this 
painting. 

It was in 1837, when Morse had rooms in the 
picturesque University Buildings, on Washington 
Square, that he completed his telegraphic invention, 

185 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

and the monument which stands in Central Park can 
not be said to have been set up ''in his memory," 
for he was given the unusual honor of having the 
statue made and set up while he was still alive. 

He and Franklin, both Americans, had subjugated 
electricity, and so, when in 1872 a statue to Franklin 
was to be unveiled in Printing House Square, Morse 
was invited to be the unveiler. He accepted; but it 
was a bitter January day, and he was in his eighty- 
first year, and the doing honor to his mighty prede- 
cessor caused his death from the cold and exposure. 




:^:M^SB^£=± 









186 



CHAPTEE XV 





1 ; " 1 -Q. A» r \^ 



ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

EW YOEK is a clubable 
city. Every New Yorker 
is supposed to belong to at 
least one club. Many be- 
long to many clubs. 
Some join so many clubs 
as to seem to be trying to 
make a collection of clubs. 
Fifth Avenue gives the 
impression of having a 
great proportion of the 
clubs: and it does really have some of the best or 
most interesting, from the Salmagundi, with its new 
home far down toward Washington Arch, to the 
^'Millionaires' Club," the Metropolitan, opposite 
lower Central Park. 

The most interesting of New York clubs have some 
special tang or atmosphere or character, from their 
representing the fine fieur of art or the stage or sci- 
ence or literature; and in this they follow the ex- 
ample of the early clubs of the city. 

The first New York club that was worthy the name 
of a club was the Friendly Club, organized shortly 

187 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

before the Revolution. That Washington, when he 
lived in New York, liked to visit its rooms, would 
alone be sufficient to mark it as a club most highly 
worth while, and it had among its members such in- 
teresting men as Charles Brockden Bro-wn, who cut 
such a figure over a century ago only to become en- 
tirely forgotten, and the still famous James Kent, 
Kent of the Commentaries, one of the great lawyers, 
great judges, great legal writers of the English-speak- 
ing world; and it would be curious, were it not, for 
New York, so entirely typical, that he is not thought 
of as a New Yorker by this city where his fame was 
won! Had he lived in, let us say, Boston, and had 
done such permanent work, you would keep running 
against his statue, you would constantly keep reading 
about him, you would not be permitted to forget that 
he was a Bostonian. But while he was alive, New 
York honored him, and when he died his funeral was 
attended by an immense throng, and flags hung at half 
mast all over the city and even on many ships in the 
harbor. 

The second club of importance was the Bread and 
Cheese, founded in 1824; and that the club was 
founded by James Fenimore Cooper and had among 
its members such men as William Cullen Bryant and 
Fitz-Greene Halleck made it a club with typical New 
York tang. Bread and cheese were used in balloting 
for membership, bread meaning the affirmative and 
cheese the negative. Cooper himself has never been 
considered a New Yorker, because he betook himself 
to Cooperstown, and identified himself with that 

188 



ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

place, and died there ; but he had so much to do with 
New York, and was here so long and so often, that 
any other city than this great indifferent city would 
be busily engaged in claiming him. But at the time 
of his death New York remembered him long enough 
to hold two special meetings to honor his memory: 
Washington Irving presided at the first, and Daniel 
Webster, with Irving sitting at his right, presided at 
the second. Even then, New York events were metro- 
politanly planned. 

That an author may not require, absolutely, that his 
surroundings fit his book, was shown by the fact that 
Cooper wrote the greater part of ''The Prairie," 
which in point of sequence closes the Leather Stock- 
ing series, at 345 Greenwich Street, in this city, and 
finished it in France ! — not writing the opening book 
of the series, "The Deerslayer," until fifteen years 
afterwards at Cooperstown. And one of the most 
curious of all literary sayings was that of the mighty 
Balzac who declared that, "Undoubtedly Cooper's re- 
no^vn is not due to his countrymen or to the English : 
he owes it mainly to the ardent appreciation of the 
French. ' ' 

Of the present day clubs, the Union Club is the old- 
est, dating back as it does to 1836 : its club house has 
gone naturally more and more nortlnvard, from one 
location to another, for the clubs of New York share 
to the full in the restless city's restlessness and 
change. 

The Lotos, until its recent removal to West 57th 
Street, was among the noted Fifth Avenue clubs, and 

189 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

it was ou Fifth Avenue that it won its proud record 

for entertaining distinguished men. As General 
Horace Porter pleasantly said at a dinner in his honor, 
''I realize that not to be dined by the Lotos Club 
•vrould cause in life the f eelmg of failure and regret. ' ' 

The University, in its splendid home at the corner 
of "West 54th Street, is one of the important Fifth 
Avenue clubs: for it is really a Fifth Avenue club 
even though the entrance to its club house is on the 
cross-street. The Century, too, whose members must 
be men who have achieved high personal distinction, 
is a Fifth Avenue club, although its club house is just 
away from the avenue, at 7 "West iSd Street. 

Innnediately north of 42nd Street, in the streets in 
the first Forties, to the right and to the left of Fifth 
Avenue, have gathered many of the fascinating shops 
of the city: not the greatest establishments, but the 
shops for specialties, the shops for embroideries, 
table-fittings, hangings, ivories, books, the shops of 
decorators and of purveyors of what may be termed 
small works of art, and the shops are remindful of 
the delightful specialty shops of Paris. 

At the corner of the avenue and 48th Street stands 
the ' ' Church in the Fort. ' ' Conforming to full for- 
mality, it is known as the Collegiate Dutch Eeformed 
Church, but it is really the principal of the lineal de- 
scendants of the little church which, in the long, long 
ago, stood within the stockade of the little fort which 
the Dutch set up in what is now Battery Park. It is 
claimed — for when New York forgets itself and really 
claims something of the past the claim is sure to be 

190 



Trr^ 




ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

well worth while ! — it is claimed that this church is the 
descendant of what was not only the very first Prot- 
estant church organization of New York, but the old- 
est Protestant church organization in the Western 
hemisphere. The bell which hangs in the steeple of 
this Fifth Avenue church is not so old as the original 
church in the Fort, but was cast in Amsterdam, almost 
two hundred years ago, in 1728. 

Tradition still tells — and is confirmed pictorially, so 
far as early pictures show — that the ancient Church 
in the Fort had a shingle roof and a wooden tower, a 
bell, but no clock, and a sundial. At one time in its 
history there were three kinds of service held within 
its wooden walls, for the Dutch held their meetings in 
the forenoon, the French at noon, and the Church of 
England in the afternoon. And the three services 
were conducted in the three languages. In the time of 
Governor Dongan there was also a Roman Catholic 
service, not in the Fort Church itself but in a little 
chapel close beside it. And so this modern church at 
48th Street brings up very old-time matters indeed. 

Occupying the block between 50th and 51st Streets 
is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick, bright 
and clean, as if new built, although it was put up half a 
century ago, James Renwick being the architect; a 
building antedating its surroundings but looking as 
new as any of them. The cornerstone was laid as 
long ago as 1858, in the presence of more than a hun- 
dred thousand people, who were massed upon the va- 
cant lots around about. 

With its twin gray spires, it is a finely impressive 

191 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

building, standing just above the level of the side- 
walk ; an excellent building, a successful and pleasant 
building, really a most admirable building. Some- 
how, a much greater sense of spaciousness has been 
secured, by its being on a terrace and by the treatment 
of the terrace, than could have been expected for such 
a great building in a single narrow block, and there is 
an undoubted effect of freedom and of airiness. 

It is thirteenth century Gothic in design, and even 
for those who know the magnificent cathedrals of Eng- 
land and France there is much of the extremely satis- 
factory about it. In its interior it is large and long 
and lofty, and its pillars, its clustered shafts of stone, 
are fine and dignified. 

At 53d Street is another church edifice in Gothic 
style ; the best example of Gothic construction of the 
present day, designed by a profound lover of the 
Gothic, the Bostonian architect Cram. It is the Epis- 
copal Church of St. Thomas, and represents, more 
than does any other, combined wealth and social po- 
sition. It has much of the charming, much of strength 
and delicacy, but its lack of space, its being built in 
too tightly, is a drawback. 

At 59th Street we come to the Plaza, at the south- 
east corner of Central Park; the main approach to 
the park, overlooked by towering hotels ; and with its 
oncewhile great open space now mostly occupied by 
an expanse of stone fountain, finely designed. 

Directly in front is General Sherman by St. Gaud- 
ens, riding finely out from among elm trees ; he is all 
in gilded bronze, on a gilded horse, and a gilded Vic- 

192 



ABOVE FOETY-SECOND 

tory floats ahead of him at the horse's bridle; all is 
on a pedestal of dull red granite and the entire monu- 
ment is superbly done ; although I think that Sherman 
himself, or any other good soldier, would have ob- 
jected to any woman, even Victory, running into a 
battle in front of him. 

Business, which has been alternating with homes 
for many blocks past, has ceased, for the present, to 
push farther north along the avenue than the Plaza, 
so that from this point onward it is still an avenue of 
homes, facing into Central Park ; but even up in this 
northerly region the homes are no longer, all of them, 
single dwellings, for apartments have begun to make 
their appearance in this section above 59th Street. 
And it is not an unmixed evil that apartment houses 
are rapidly replacing individual homes even in such 
neighborhoods as those bordering Central Park and 
Riverside, for under the new system a far greater 
number of people will be able to enjoy the air and 
the view and the openness of life, and by so much there 
will be more of health and of happiness. And it may 
fairly be supposed that there will be something of 
what is known as exclusiveness when it is understood 
that there are apartments in these favored regions 
renting for as much as twenty or thirty thousand dol- 
lars a year. 

In a general way this upper part of Fifth Avenue 
for some blocks north and some blocks south of 59th 
Street, as to the homes of the avenue itself and those 
close by on the cross streets, has come to stand in 
the public mind for the richest of New Yorkers, for 

193 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

the greatest of wealth and social power. With the 
permeative butlers and chauffeurs, with every symp- 
tom of costly living, with its air of orderly peaceful- 
ness and of holding aloof from the ordinary problems 
of ordinary mankind, it is the district which seems to 
be the most absolutely differentiated from those hum- 
ble sections of the city where crime is understood most 
to flourish, and degeneracy, and the short and simple 
scandals of the poor. 

But without any exploitation of the seamy side of 
life, it is well to know that scandal and crime and fam- 
ily dissension are not exclusively characteristic of the 
moneyless. Over yonder, in this district of great 
wealth, lived a man who rose from the penitentiary to 
world-wide prominence and the possession of millions 
of dollars. In that other house, easily within view of 
the 59th Street corner, lived a man of vast financial, 
social and political power, with the additional power 
of mighty family connections: but scandal came 
quietly into his life, and, indeed, quietly snuffed that 
life away — for a woman crept into this great palace 
one night, and faced him in his stately, somber library 
— and apoplexy was quietly set down as the cause of 
his sudden death. 

All, here, must be done quietly. The amour propre 
of these exclusive people must not be disturbed, even 
when trouble has come, as it so often has come, from 
what may be termed ^^ amours impropre." 

Those who may have been disappointed by the gen- 
eral orderliness of aspect of the Bowery will note that 
there is the same outward orderliness in Fifth Ave- 

194 



ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

nue. And if I mention that crimes, divorces, scandal- 
ously swift new marriages, have come here, and that 
the entire gamut of disgrace has been run within some 
of these palatial homes, it is only to be remindful that 
the rich and the poor are brothers and sisters under 
the skin, and that shame and opprobrium come where 
there is no excuse of poverty and of straitened lives. 

If, to the numerous unhappy happenings of private 
life, it were advisable to add the savage tragedies of 
business in which dwellers hereabouts participated, 
and the ruthless ruin wrought by some of them in 
Wall Street, and the betrayals of friendship for gold, 
it would merely point out, still further, that the pos- 
session of money does not necessarily add to the 
sweetness of life. 

But there are many wealthy homes here that have 
remained untouched by scandal or by crime; there 
have been many wealthy folk here who have lived self- 
respecting lives, and many others whose only offense 
has been in a perhaps too ostentatious expenditure, 
and others, or at least one other, who lived in so pe- 
nurious a way that his clothes were cheaper than those 
that any clerk in his own office would dare to wear. 
Of this man, who left seventy millions or so, which is 
being administered in public-spirited undertakings 
and charities since his death, it used to be told that he 
loved to ride in the now vanished horse stages, on 
Fifth Avenue, for the fare was five cents, or six tickets 
for a quarter, and the money was passed from hand to 
hand up to the man at front who was driver and con- 
ductor in one; and this cunning seventy-millionaire 

195 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

would take his seat by the money-box, would buy his 
quarter's worth of tickets, and, after putting his own 
in the box, would sequester the other nickels as they 
came and in place of them would put in tickets, thus 
making five cents, or on fortunate days even ten, on a 
single trip. It kept his hand in. 

A great society leader who lived not far above 59th 
Street, the greatest leader that New York society ever 
had, used especially to flaunt in the faces of her fol- 
lowers a magnificent necklace, one so altogether in- 
comparable that society worshiped it as the very sign 
and symbol of leadership. But after the great social 
dictator 's death, it was necessary to have an appraisal 
of her wealth — whereupon it was discovered that 
many of the jewels of the rich necklace that society 
had so worshiped were false ! — a striking example of 
the worship, by society, of false gauds. 

Quite a proportion of the homes of Fifth Avenue, 
now some and now others, are always shuttered and 
closed; in summer because it is warm, in winter be- 
cause it is cold, in spring or fall for unguessable rea- 
sons ; all with blinds drawn, doors boarded up tight, 
shut, repellent. A restless city this, with too much 
money. Many an owner of this or that home is in 
Florida or Maine, in the Grand Caiion on the way to 
the Pacific coast, or at Newport, in Bermuda, or in the 
Berkshires or in Europe. 

Fifth Avenue above 59th Street shows wide variety 
of architecture. There are imitation chateaus, some 
of them poor imitations, and some successful copies 
of the gay and laughing French Renaissance: there 

196 



ABOVE FOETY-SECOND 

are dungeon-like fortresses, the house of this or that 
sugar king or banker without taste : there are houses 
of that unattractive period known as Victorian : and 
there are also, among the newer homes, some that are 
simple and graceful and of real beauty. 

At 70th Street, and occupying the block to 71st is the 
finest of all, the finest private house in Manhattan. 
It was built by a typical New Yorker ; that is to say, a 
man who came here from another city — the Pitts- 
burgher, Frick, and if I should add his first names, 
Henry Clay, it would show, in good American fashion, 
that he was born when the Mill Boy of the Slashes was 
at the height of his fame. The Frick house is French 
Classic in design ; it is restful, restrained, simple, not 
high, admirable in proportion and symmetry ; and in 
front is a broad open space finely greened with grass 
and thickly edged with old box — one wonders what 
ancient garden in Maryland or Virginia was depleted 
to furnish forth this box ! 

A few blocks farther up the avenue than this best 
house in New York is the house of a western copper 
king which fills a great corner with a fantasy in rococo, 
a fantasy in stone and bronze on which has been lav- 
ished more money than on any other home in New 
York. 

The block between 90th and 91st is occupied by the 
home of Andrew Carnegie. It is built in the old Co- 
lonial way and is admirable so far as the Colonial is 
followed ; that is to say, up to the dormers, which are 
not precisely pleasing. On the whole it is an elf ective 
and even charming mansion, built of brick of a soft- 

197 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

colored red, and with trimmings of a gray stone that 
is almost white. Like the Frick house, this has gen- 
erously been given setting and spaciousness, for a 
great open garden is in front of it; the house itself, 
rather oddly, facing 90th Street instead of Fifth Ave- 
nue; and about the open space is a great open-work 
iron fence with magnificent stone posts. 

And it is one of the most striking facts in regard to 
New York that what may be considered the three most 
distinguished private homes in the city, the Frick and 
Carnegie homes and the Schwab home on Riverside 
Drive, are the homes of wealthy men of Pittsburgh 
who came to New York after their fortunes were 
made! 

For New York is a magnet that draws not only 
young men eager to make their fortunes, but older men 
whose fortune has been gained. And all this makes 
for the noticeable lack of homogeneousness in the 
city. Most New Yorkers meet none with whom they 
are on terms of lifelong friendship. There is a 
marked absence of first-name intimacy. It is largely, 
and indeed mostly, a city of detached human units. 

Facing the Carnegie front is a bare lot, squalid and 
squatter-like, unsightly, even immensely ugly. For 
years the multi-millionaire has faced this squalor, but, 
as I write, he has belatedly bought the corner and will 
sell it to some one who will build a home there and not 
an apartment house. 

A curious feature of Fifth Avenue, in the portion 
facing upper Central Park, is that even yet there are 

198 



ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

some spots which have never been built upon; there 
is land which has stood absolutely vacant, held for 
high prices during all these years of the city 's growth. 

Central Park, stretching from 59th to 110th Streets, 
and from Fifth to Eighth Avenues, is one of the noble 
city parks of the world, in dimensions, in beauty, in 
variety of water and trees and rolling ground and 
levels, in flowers and shrubs, in great spaces given 
over to play. There seem to be miles of rhododen- 
drons blooming on the banks, there is splendid dog- 
wood blossoming white, and everything is beautifully 
cared for. Retaining all the charm of wildness, Avith 
the characteristics of the best of landscape gardening, 
it fits finely that fine Wordsworthian line, * ' the pomp 
of cultivated nature. ' ' 

The prettiest feature of the park is the May Day 
parties, when many a Queen of the May leads her fol- 
lowers there, all gay and blythe and happy, all bub- 
bling with anticipation, all in holiday garb and fancy 
dress, which is usually white and tinsel and gold with 
ribbons of all shades, and usually there are vari-col- 
ored streamers for the girls to hold as they dance 
around a Maypole, and often there is music. So 
many parties ask for permits that time and space 
must be allotted, and not only does the first day of 
May make the great open space of the park gay and 
delightful, but for days thereafter many a party still 
comes gaily to the park. 

Toward evening after their day of proud excite- 
ment, the little girls trail homeward, tired, but still 

199 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

steeped in happiness, ready to lie down sleepily and 
to dream of the excitement of the May Day of the year 
to come. 

The Metropolitan Museum, a great mass of build- 
ings which have gone up gradually since the founda- 
tion of the museum in 1870, is located in Central Park, 
just above Eightieth Street, and faces out on Fifth 
Avenue in a great long frontage. The distinguished 
collections, gathered here into spacious housing, make 
this preeminently the museum of America ; indeed, it 
has already become one of the great museums of the 
world. 

There are galleries of paintings by the greatest 
masters of the past and the present. Titian and Rem- 
brandt and Raphael are here. Van Dyck and Velas- 
quez are here, Botticelli and Franz Hals and Reynolds 
are here, and here also are the American, Sargent, and 
others of the recent and present years. 

The sumptuous collections seem to cover every 
branch of art and of artistic activity, and have been 
gathered from every corner of the world. There is a 
splendid collection of sculpture. There are laces and 
textiles that represent the finest technical artistry of 
the world. There are silver and glass and bronze and 
copper and iron. There are glorious gatherings of 
porcelain. There is a noble presentation of ancient 
armor. There is the work of unknown men of the 
past and there is the work of artists and artisans who 
won fame with their genius. 

Notable among all these things is what is known 
as the Rospigliosi Coupe, a wonderful cup by the won- 

200 



ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

derful Florentine, Benvenuto Cellini, perfect in its 
gorgeousness, in its shape, in its gold and enamels and 
jewels. 

There are models of the most beautiful architecture 
of the entire world, temples, palaces, cathedrals, thus 
admirably bringing to New York the beauty of the 
world. 

In the labyrinthine rooms, endless in extent, there is 
opportunity for each to find the particular kind of col- 
lection which interests him ; and perhaps one will no- 
tice in particular a replica of Houdon's Washington; 
the French sculptor having been brought from France 
to America, through the efforts of Franklin, that he 
might give to the world George Washington in imper- 
ishable marble; and there is also Houdon's Paul 
Jones, this being a replica from Houdon 's studio, and 
precisely like one which is given a high place of honor 
in, of all places, Edinburgh !— for one would expect 
Paul Jones to be far from popular in Edinburgh, as 
he landed, an American privateer, at Edinburgh's 
port of Leith, frightened away the soldiers, and levied 
contributions at will. But I suppose the Scotch look 
on him after all as a famous Scotchman, even though 
as an adopted American he frightened Great Britain 
with American ships. 

There is an excellent collection of early American 
furniture, not only of the Sheraton and Chippendale 
and Heppelwhite styles, but also of pieces which set 
the collection in a class by itself through definitely 
representing the American point of view. For exam- 
ple, importance is given to the furniture of that Dun- 

201 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

can Pliyf e who, a New Yorker, with a shop near Cham- 
bers Street, made admirable pieces of furniture in the 
early eighteen hundreds, and won high reputation as 
a worker and designer of artistic skill. It marks dis- 
tinct advance in national taste and knowledge, that the 
best museums, such as those of New York and Boston 
and Philadelphia, include the furniture of a century 
and a century and a half ago among the products of 
real art — shapes and makes that may still be gathered 
— and it was this cabinet maker of New York, Phyf e, 
who, more than any other worker on his side of the 
Atlantic, carried on fine furniture making as an art. 

A further matter of interest from a local New York 
standpoint is a glorious punch bowl, of mighty dimen- 
sions, with a view of New York harbor covering its 
entire bottom. It was made in Canton and is of Chi- 
nese Lowestoft, and was presented to New York City 
on July 4, 1812, by a long forgotten General Morton. 
The view is from Brooklyn and shows the sky-line of 
early days ; and the bowl was until recent years kept 
on exhibition in the City Hall, and flowed with punch 
at all civic jollifications. 

Close behind the Museum buildings, stands what is 
almost forgotten in these busy modern days, although 
for a long time it was one of the most visited objects 
in the entire city. It is still referred to as Cleopatra's 
Needle, although it is far older than the time of that 
friend of Mark Antony. It is a tall obelisk, covered 
with hieroglyphics, and was brought here from Egypt 
years ago, towed in a box-like receptacle, behind a 

202 



ABOVE FORTY-SECOND 

steamer, and it is typically American that the one fact 
generally referred to in regard to it is that the cost of 
getting it here from Egypt was one hundred thousand 
dollars. It is seventy-one feet high, and was quarried 
in the sixteenth century before Christ, in the reign of 
Thotmes the Third, at Syene. Its weight is 488,000 
pounds. It was set up before the Temple of the Sun, 
at Heliopolis. 

Its journey to New York, less than half a century 
ago, was not the first journey in its history, for it so 
attracted the attention of the ancient Romans, as 
standing for art and what even then was ancient his- 
tory, that it was carried down to Alexandria and set 
up there as a mighty trophy, it then being about six- 
teen hundred years of age. 

And this great obelisk, with its inscriptions of thou- 
sands of years ago still plainly upon it, stands here in 
the heart of New York ; this splendid relic of a mistily 
distant antiquity rises beside a park driveway in this 
most modern of cities ! 

It has outlasted wonderful civilizations. It saw the 
fall of Egypt. It stood while Rome rose to world su- 
premacy and sank to nothingness. Through the 
course of centuries, other mighty powers rose and fell. 
It was after it had stood at Alexandria about as long 
as it had before that stood at Heliopolis, that it was 
brought to New York ; and it may well be wondered 
what other journey, in the course of coming centuries, 
may yet be in store for it. As compared with the 
sixteen hundred years that it stood at Heliopolis, and 

203 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the eighteen hundred years that it stood at Alexan- 
dria, Americans need not think that any particular 
permanence is represented by the petty forty years or 
so that it has stood in Central Park. 




'•^'■^4^. 



1 :;^'t^*». '••>.;< ''/<i^-"xvv ^ 





204 




CHAPTER XVI 

ON MURRAY HILL. 

HARLES DICKENS, when, 
from curiosity and interest, 
he attended an exhibition of 
the Spiritualists, felt that an 
excellent test could be made 
by calling for the ghost of 
r^^'ff.S''' Lindley Murray, whereupon 
. jjifl'-v'''*'' '4^ he did so, and was rewarded 
^iKi?"'f/ by catching the ghost in a 

grammatical blunder — which 
to Dickens was evidence sufficient that it was not 
really Lindley Murray's spirit, for Lindley Murray 
was looked upon in England as the highest possible 
authority on English grammar; his supremacy was 
unchallenged — and this in spite of the amusing and 
amazing fact that he was an American, and that the 
home of his parents has given name to that aristo- 
cratic section of New York City known as Murray 
Hill. 

When Sydney Smith, in 1820, published his cele- 
brated gibe on America, demanding to know, among 
other things, who ever read an American book, he was 
too intelligent a man not to know that Washington 

205 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Irving of New York had been hailed as a great au- 
thor by the greatest of British authors, and he also 
knew that a book by another New Yorker, Lindley 
Murray, had been accepted as the standard authority 
on writing by all British writers, and that he, Sydney 
Smith himself, paid it deference. 

The house of the Murrays was the scene of one of 
the finest and prettiest stories in all American history. 
It was a mansion standing in the midst of a large 
estate, in the vicinity of what is now East 37th Street 
and Park Avenue, and a tablet on a bowlder, set 
against the railed-in greenery in the middle of the 
avenue, marks the spot where the house stood. The 
district now known as Murray Hill reaches in a gen- 
eral way from 34th Street to 42d Street and from 
Lexington Avenue across Madison and Park to Fifth. 
It is still somewhat of a hill : a slight rise is noticeable 
in mounting Fifth Avenue, and the trolley-car tunnel 
on Park Avenue is even more of an evidence. The 
district, in spite of the inroads of business, still carries 
itself with an air. In the Revolutionary period the 
Murray mansion stood in isolation. 

There was great excitement there on a day in the 
middle of September in 1776, for British troops had 
landed nearby, on the East River shore, and were pre- 
paring to advance across Manhattan Island. 

The general military situation was serious. The 
British under General Howe had occupied Staten 
Island early in July, much to the disturbance of Wash- 
ington, who had had no means of preventing it. Soon 
afterwards Howe's brother. Admiral Howe, arrived 

206 



ON MURRAY HILL 

from England, and other forces came up from the 
southward, making a total of fully 24,000 men. The 
British did not, however, attempt to cross the bay 
directly to Manhattan, but, after more than a month's 
reflection, went over to Long Island, landing at 
Gravesend. On August 26th was fought the unfortu- 
nate battle of Long Island, following which "Washing- 
ton achieved the marvelous feat, which immensely 
astonished the British, of safely transporting his 
beaten and outnumbered army to Manhattan Island. 

Washington hoped to hold New York, and stationed 
his troops at various points to prevent a British cross- 
ing. For over two weeks the leisurely British made 
no attempt to get over the East River, but on Septem- 
ber 15th, when they were quite ready, they began send- 
ing boatload after boatload of soldiers and landing 
them at Kip's Bay, on the lower edge of the great 
Murray estate, at the end of what is now East 34th 
Street. 

Washington had left his army in a dangerous po- 
sition through the desire not to lose prestige for Amer- 
ica by giving up New York and Manhattan Island. A 
little later in his career, when he had been broadened 
by experience, he would not, even to please the Pro- 
vincial Congress and to encourage the people in gen- 
eral, have taken such a risk as to leave his army scat- 
tered over many miles of a narrow island, liable to be 
separated and cut in half. He trusted to a vigorous 
defense by his soldiers and swift concentration of 
more troops at any threatened point — but when tlie 
moment of trial came, the American soldiers at Kip 's 

207 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

Bay, at the very appearance of the British, fled in dis- 
order, without firing a shot; whereupon more and 
more of the British landed and in leisurely fashion 
prepared to march across the island. 

Washington galloped toward the danger point. He 
reached the fleeing troops not far from what is now 
40th Street and Park Avenue and tried to check the re- 
treat. He was in a fierce rage. He struck at the men 
with the flat of his sword, he clicked his pistols at 
them, he fiercely ordered them to halt and form, but 
in vain. Panic had seized them, and they would not 
heed. He knew, in those moments of bitterness, that 
this almost surely meant the destruction of his army 
and therefore the loss of the war. He turned his 
horse 's head toward the British and moved, alone, in 
that direction. And one thinks of Napoleon in the 
rout of Waterloo, turning his horse 's head as if to ad- 
vance on the British but drawm back by an officer who 
seized the bridle and demanded to laiow if the Em- 
peror would charge the enemy alone ; for here on Park 
Avenue a young officer seized the bridle of Washing- 
ton's horse and urged the general to come away; 
which, after a moment's hesitation, Washington, al- 
ways superb master of himself, did. 

Then he sent messengers galloping swiftly to Gen- 
eral Putnam, who was in command at the southern 
end of the island, ordering swift and instant retreat 
to the northward, and he checked, at length, the disor- 
dered huddling of the flying men. 

Fortunately, there could have been no better man, 
ready for action at an instant's notice, than Israel 

208 



ON MUEEAY HILL 

Putnam, * ' Old Put. ' ' Had Israel Putnam lived thou- 
sands of years ago, his single-handed struggle with a 
wolf in its den would have put him in the legendary 
class with Ulysses and the lion — and probably, after 
all, that lion of Ulysses was only a magnified wolf. 
Had Putnam lived in mediaeval days Scott would have 
immortalized him in verse on account of his gallop 
down the rocks at Greenwich. Had he been a general 
under Napoleon or Wellington such an achievement 
as his on this day of Murray Hill would have kept his 
name prominently honored in history. But since he 
was only an American of the Eevolution he is just 
''Old Put." 

The moment he received his orders he collected his 
troops and started northward. Alexander Hamilton 
hurried along, in charge of a battery. The redoubt- 
able Knox drew in his men and cannon from a fort on 
a slight eminence that, on account of Boston memor- 
ies, had been given the name of Bunker Hill, and which 
was on what is now Grand Street. And Aaron Burr, 
capable and brave as he was, guided the entire force, 
by obscure paths and lanes, keeping them as near the 
North Eiver as possible, to increase the chances of 
safely escaping the British. 

What a scene it was, and what men took active 
part: Washington, Putnam, Burr, Hamilton, Knox! 
In Edinburgh, in Paris, in Eome, in London, such a 
day, with such men, would forever be written about 
in prose and in poetry, and especially from the de- 
lightful end of it all, which was to come with a ro- 
mantic tang from the Murray mansion. 

209 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

General Washington waited in an agony of anxiety. 
At length his scouts brought word that the British 
had halted near the Murray mansion. 

And the cause of it all was amazing. The greatest 
man of his time had vainly done all that man could do 
to stop the British — and then a woman made the at- 
tempt and won ! 

She won with woman's weapons. It was one of 
those desperate days that come to New York in mid- 
September. Mrs. Murray, Mary Lindley Murray, 
whose husband was Robert Murray, well known to be 
a British loyalist, and whose son was Lindley Murray, 
was herself in entire sympathy with the Americans. 
She had watched their disorderly retreat; she knew, 
or at least divined, what overwhelming disaster was 
imminent. And so she seized the moment when some 
of the leading officers were passing her house, to 
check them. And it was so simply done! She in- 
vited them in to rest and take a glass of wine and 
some cake! Handsome, a lady of high degree, an 
American grande dame, the wife of a loyalist, her in- 
vitation was accepted. The day was hot. There was 
no hurry, thought the easy British. And so Lord 
Howe and his leading officers entered Mrs. Murray's 
home, and the British soldiers threw themselves 
loungingly on the grass and under the trees. Thus 
the British advance was halted. And meanwhile, 
Putnam's men were swiftly marching northward. 

And one cannot but picture the feelings of Mrs. 
Murray who, smiling, cheerful, cordial, well-gowned, 
hiding her intense anxiety, receiving the homage of 

210 



ON MUREAY HILL 

the scarlet-coated men of title, listening to their flat- 
tering toasts, was also listening and intensely hoping 
for something that would tell her that her effort was 
not in vain. And by the time that the leisurely British 
were ready to march, and had made their farewell 
compliments and adieux, the forces of Putnam and 
Washington had united and the danger was over. 

The spot where the two generals met is still remem- 
bered. It is on Broadway, between 43d and 44th 
Streets ; and a commemorative tablet has been placed 
on the building which stands there. And it makes the 
event the more striking, that the meeting place was on 
Long Acre Square, in the center of the present theater 
and dining and pleasure district of the city! From 
this spot the two generals moved their united forces 
northward to Harlem. 

Two nights before the visit of General Howe and 
his officers, the Murray mansion had had an even 
more distinguished guest, for Washington himself had 
stayed there ; and Robert Murray, Quaker and Royal- 
ist sympathizer though he was, could not but feel hon- 
ored by the visit of so great a man, even though it 
was made on account of military convenience and was 
a visit which could not have been declined. And there 
can be no doubt that the recent presence of Washing- 
ton, and the immense impression that he always made, 
on men and women alike, had the direct result of spur- 
ring the patriotic Mrs. Murray, so shortly afterwards, 
to her delightfully superb effort. 

The Grand Central Railway Station, at the north- 
ern edge of Murray Hill, is among the great railway 

211 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

stations of the world, for size and for vastness of pas- 
senger traffic handled. The railway tracks come into 
the station after several miles of burrowing beneath 
the streets, and enter the station itself on two levels 
of tracks, one above the other. 

In the quiet car-less eddy of Madison Avenue below 
42d Street, where the hill shows very plainly in the 
vistas down all the streets, stands the big, square- 
fronted house that was the home of the late J. Pier- 
pont Morgan ; it is but a dull-looking house, after all, 
one thinks : not such a home as would be expected for 
a man of world-wide financial power who was at the 
same time a princely collector of objects of art. But 
around the corner, on 36th Street, is a building which 
he put up to represent his ideals, and to house a pri- 
vate collection, especially of books and manuscripts, 
which had cost him fabulous sums. The building is an 
architectural gem ; it is of white marble, low-set, tem- 
ple-like, small, yet with an air of gentle spaciousness 
and surrounded by a small area of exquisitely kept 
grass. 




CHAPTEE XVII 



MIDST PLEASUEES AND PALACES 




.\.. 



Ml' 



OR the typical pleasures of New 
York, according to popular 
fancy, people go to the *' Great 
White Way" and its palaces — 
and if the palaces are largely 
those which are colloquially of 
the kind termed *' lobster," the 
idea still holds. 
\, But a curious thing about this 

*' White Way" part of Broadway, which is supposed 
to be so representative of the city, is that in the day- 
time it is far from being the best looking part of the 
city. There are not serried rows of mighty business 
buildings. There is not the air of wealthy comfort 
that attends those portions of the city where great 
new apartment houses vie mth individual homes. 
On the gay night region of Broadway most of the 
buildings are unattractive, and even ugly: they are 
uneven, irregular, bizarre of effect; and taken col- 
lectively the effect is even less desirable than when 
taken building by building or block by block. This 
most famous portion of Broadway has much of the 
rough irregularity of the main street of a mining city ; 

213 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

and, furthermore, the street itself is in a chronic state 
of being torn up, for repairs or new pavement, or for 
putting in new sewer pipes, or for building or alter- 
ing a subway. 

At night it is really a region of gayety. Then the 
ugliness of torn-up street and of uneven and unat- 
tractive architecture is undiscerned or unregarded. 
A new Broadway has come with darkness, a Broad- 
way of lights and lightsomeness and lightheartedness. 

A great part of the people who move along the 
''Great White Way" are not New Yorkers, but visit- 
ors : and it is these who furnish the chief support of 
much of the more vicious and vivacious features. 
The New Yorker himself, unless he is one of the idle 
sons of the rich, has his daily work to do. He goes to 
the theater, if he is a typical intelligent New Yorker, 
often enough to keep in touch with the best or most 
notable plays and "shows" of the season. He often 
dines at some well-known restaurant — although, be- 
ing a New Yorker, he is quite likely to choose a place 
that is just away from the rush of pretentiousness. 
And he goes home at an hour neither particularly 
early nor particularly late, for he must be clear- 
headed at his office next morning. He is not an early- 
to-bed man. But he is not an all-night ''rounder." 

But the visitor to New York is different. The vis- 
itor has money to spend and prefers spending it dur- 
ing the hours of artificial light. And he isn't in any 
hurry to get to his hotel and bed, for he doesn't care 
if he sleeps until noon next day. The closing of res- 
taurants and cabarets at one in the morning, on ac- 

214 



MIDST PLEASURES AND PALACES 

count of our entry into the World War, affected New 
Yorkers comparatively little but visitors a great 
deal. 

The visitor is apt to be frankly in search, not only 
of the high-priced and hectic but of the lax and loose. 
At his home in some distant city he is probably a 
quiet enough citizen, a staid business man, but on 
Broadway he is likely to get a fifty cent cigar between 
his teeth and fling extravagant tips, and become arro- 
gant and boastful, and make it clear that he ''has the 
price"; and if, afterwards, he offers an excuse, it is 
the world-old plea that ''the woman tempted me and 
I did treat. " It is this class of man who, inviting and 
receiving the attentions of swindlers and robbers and 
sharpers, gets into the police courts and gives New 
York more of a reputation for wickedness than it de- 
serves. For, after all, the average New Yorker is 
neither victimizer nor victimized. 

The "spender" is a feature of New York night life. 
It is estimated, by such as have particular opportun- 
ity to know, that merely for holding the checkroom 
privileges of the popular restaurants and hotels, from 
two to ten thousand dollars is annually paid and that, 
for special cab and taxi-stand privileges, the annual 
payment may be from two thousand dollars up to ten 
or twenty or even thirty thousand — ^for the real 
spender must never walk ! 

There are many visitors who, though they have 
yearned for the sparkle and gayety and lights, and 
have longed to be part of it, desire perfect respecta- 
bility: people who love to catch their breath at the 

215 



THE BOOK OP NEW YORK 

edge of wickedness, but who are not going to be even 
a small particle wicked. 

I remember a dear old university president from 
the West, now dead, who looked me up one day to say, 
with delightful hesitations and backings and fillings, 
that as he had known me for years he wanted to ask 
me to show him about the city and take him into 
places which a dignified old university president 
could scarcely find alone. ''Nothing out of the way" 
— he was absolutely sincere about that — "but — you 
know — something not too deadly respectable.*' And 
I remember his smile as he said this. He wanted a 
little of the spice, pepper, tabasco of life, and it was 
easy enough to find them within the desired limita- 
tions. And I remember that he did not want to go to 
bed at his usual home hour: it was the usual lure of 
the lights. 

It is estimated, by railway officials, that, entirely 
exclusive of commuters, fully two hundred thousand 
visitors enter New York City every day! And a 
large part enter through the station of the Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad, a palatial structure, a mighty, mass- 
ive pillared building built over a great area, near 
Broadway, for the entire two blocks from 33d to 31st 
Streets. It is literally palatial : the word is no mere 
figure of speech. It is mighty, it is wonderful and it 
is beautiful. It is of superb classic design, as if it 
were "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur 
that was Rome ' ' put into stone in modern America. 

Its vast interior extent, its breadths and heights, 
its groined roofs, its stone stairways mighty of width, 

216 




CLASSIC PILLARS OF THE PENNSYLVANIA STATION 



MIDST PLEASURES AND PALACES 

its air of princely magnificence — yet all this, not the 
artistic dream of some monarch of unlimited wealth 
who a stately pleasure dome decreed, but the work of 
a railway company for the use of the public ! It gives 
the impression more of an enormous concourse for 
the reception and departure of people than a place of 
trains, for all the trains run in excavated courses, 
underneath; none are for surface traffic on Manhat- 
tan ; they come under the East Eiver from Xew Eng- 
land and Long Island, and from the westward be- 
neath the Hudson Eiver, and intermediately burrow 
beneath the city streets. In never-ceasing throngs 
visitors are arriving at this terminal, at the Grand 
Central, and at the terminals of the other railroads. 
And every visitor is certain to see Broadway at night. 
It must not be thought that when night falls Xew 
York is quietly at home, leaving Broadway in the pos- 
session of strangers! During much of the evening 
New Yorkers are much in evidence. And this is nat- 
ural. With an immense proportion of the popula- 
tion, with almost all in fact, there is compression of 
home life ; and this, not only in the tenements but in 
apartment houses. From that compression the peo- 
ple must get away. The theaters, the restaurants, the 
moving pictures, the recreation piers, the lighted 
streets, all draw them, and it is natural that they 
should be drawn. The more or less legendary ex- 
ample of the five families occupying one room, with 
one family in each corner and one in the middle, and 
all getting on comfortably until the family in the 
middle began to take boarders, illustrates the com- 

217 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

pression of the city's life, which thrusts its people 
out upon Grand Street as on Broadway. But New 
Yorkers, poor and rich alike, have their work to do 
next day, even though at night the rich man may have 
waited for a while in what has been termed the ' ' silk- 
stocking bread line," for his chance at a table in a 
hectically fashionable dining-room. 

One of the striking differences between the gayest 
region of Paris and that of New York — and these two 
cities are naturally to be compared, for they are the 
gayest cities of the world for ' ' spenders ' ' ; and I am 
referring, now, not to war-time but to normal times 
of peace — is that so much of the Parisian gayety is 
cheerfully in evidence at boulevard tables, a feature 
quite omitted in New York, which interprets the open- 
ness of the boulevard into terms of lofty roof -gar- 
dens. 

New York is the diamond stick-pin on the shirt- 
front of America. And I do not mean to imply or 
state that, because average New Yorkers get to bed 
earlier than average visitors. New Yorkers are an 
economical race. For those who have money to spend 
love to spend it ! While one half of the city is trou- 
bled with the high cost of living, the other half learns, 
conversely, the cost of high living; and it may be 
added that neither half knows how the other half 
lives. 

Broadway has always been loved. Mrs. John 
Adams, Abigail Adams, when necessarily removing 
from New York to Philadelphia, that having been 
made the national capital and her husband being 

218 



MIDST PLEASURES AND PALACES 

Vice-President, wrote, "And when all is done it will 
not be Broadway." And this from a Boston woman, 
a Quincy and an Adams ! 

The theaters of the city are vast in number, and 
throngs night after night fill them. 

The theaters are of all sizes, from those which are so 
tiny that people on opposite sides of the intimate 
little auditorium can almost shake hands across the 
intervening space, to the show-places of immensity, 
with their rows of seats stretching oif through in- 
credible space into incredible remoteness. No other 
city rivals New York in theaters. And yet it ought 
to be pride-chastening to know that ancient Rome 
had a theater that seated many thousand more spec- 
tators than New York's greatest. Still, even that 
Roman Coliseum was alone. There was no aggrega- 
tion of theaters in Rome, ablaze with lights, thronged 
nightly with a huge total of tens of thousands ; and in 
this total of theaters, catering as they do to every 
class, New York stands unexcelled. 

Moving picture houses are infinitely numerous, and 
they vary from the humble five-centers to the great 
theaters, built especially for picture-giving, whose 
seats will range from fifteen cents to a half dollar. 
These great new theaters offer at their best a delight 
to the ear and to the eye, comfortable seats, a glow of 
color, a great deal of music, and an entertainment 
which in all is likely to be of quite as good an influ- 
ence as the plays at the high-priced theaters next 
door; and these ''movies," with the big vaudeville 
theaters, represent a revolt of the people against 

219 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

high prices for an evening "s entertainment and 
against late honrs of beginning, and against long 
waits between acts, and agi\inst that absence of mnsic 
which marks a growing number of the expensive 
theaters. 

Xew York unquestionably is the center for the 
American drama; the *' legit unate." Whether its 
judgment is right or wrong, it is practically final, for 
no play is deemed a success in America unless it has 
won Broadway approval, or what is chilled "Broad- 
way," for the most important plays, presented by the 
best actors, are nowadays much more likely to be 
given, not at the theaters actually on Broadway, but 
at this or that of a new order of theater, built close 
to Broadway but just off it ; new theaters with little 
insignificant lobbies through which the people hurry 
as fast as possible, instead of the great foyers of not 
many years ago where everybody liked to see and be 
seen. 

This has had a marked ed'ect on the general char- 
acter of the Broadway after-theater throng ; for most 
of the better-looking people, the more intelligent and 
less noisily dressed, leave the theaters on these side 
streets, and make their way home in their own motor- 
cars or by subway or Elevated or Fifth Avenue bus, 
without even setting foot on Broadway. The inter- 
esting, vivacious, well-groomed after-theater throng 
of the past, crowdmg the Broadway sidewalks as it 
did. has thus gone. 

That the hotels ui Xew York have become of im- 
mense size and growing importance, is due not only 

^ 226 



MIDST PLEASUEES AND PALACES 

to the increasing number of visitors, but to a marked 
tendency on the part of certain well-to-do classes of 
New Yorkers, and suburban home-owners who spend 
a month or two in town, to make their homes at hotels, 
and also to the increasing use of hotels by New York- 
ers who live in apartment houses. 

This last development is singular, but at the same 
time has been inevitable. For even the rich cannot 
entertain freely in their apartments. There is not 
enough room there, and so more and more they enter- 
tain at the great hotels. The daughters of the rich 
are married at hotels, there are dinners at the hotels, 
there are dances and receptions at the hotels, instead 
of, as in the New York of the past, at private homes. 
East Side parties or weddings or dinners, at an East 
Side restaurant or hall, became long ago the East 
Side's way of getting over the lack of tenement-house 
space, and in recent years the wealthy have adopted 
this idea for themselves and carried it out with their 
usual lavishness of expense. 

Afternoon tea has become another feature of Amer- 
ican life, and the New York hotel tea-rooms and the 
dining and lunching rooms, and the hotel corridors 
and down-stairs lobbies, now give opportunity for the 
display of woman's beauty and woman's gowns. 

No city in the world is so alive with light, so bril- 
liant, so glo^ving, so radiant, so gleaming, so spark- 
ling, as is New York. The Hessian Baroness Rie- 
desel lived for a time on Long Island when her hus- 
band, the Baron, had his soldiers there, in Eevolu- 
tionary days, and she wrote : * ' Every evening I saw 

221 



THE BOOK OP NEW YOEK 

from my window the city of New York entirely 
lighted up." And the city, except for after one 
o'clock in the morning war orders, still maintains its 
lighted-up characteristics. 

The dweller in Manhattan forgets what night is. 
That is to say, he forgets the meaning of night and of 
darkness in the sense in which night and darkness are 
known to people of other places, not only in country 
regions but in other cities. Throughout the night 
brilliant lights are everywhere. No Manhattan 
dweller ever knows whether or not, at night, the moon 
is shining, and that he should have any knowledge as 
to whether or not the stars are out is ridiculously un- 
thinkable. Had Emerson been a New Yorker he 
would never have written his advice to hitch your 
wagon to a star ! 

The lights of New York began with the Broadway 
lights of 1679, and they would seem to have been some- 
what different from the Broadway lights of today, 
for they merely carried out the orders of the city 
authorities that every seventh house should hang out 
a pole with a lantern and a lighted candle, on nights 
when there was no moon; and the expense of this 
elaborate lighting was to be divided among the house- 
holders, not only of the seventh houses but of the in- 
termediate sixes as well. 

New York was slow in coming to any marked ad- 
vance in lights. There were for a time merely more 
lanterns and candles, and then there were years of 
oil (not coal oil, not kerosene, but whale oil), and at 

222 



MIDST PLEASURES AND PALACES 

length came gas, the first gaspipe being laid in Broad- 
way, from the Battery to Canal Street, in 1825. 

With this encouragement New York began to be, 
for those times, very brilliant ; and when old Niblo 's, 
at Broadway and Prince Street, pioneer as it was in 
vari-colored lighting, began to dazzle Broadway with 
gas jets in red and white and blue glass cups, strung 
on an iron pipe, for the purpose of advertising, to the 
street, the particular attraction of the time, it was a 
triumph indeed. And at length came electricity. 

Even in the massed tenement streets the dwellers 
do not know the meaning of real darkness. From 
every side, in every window, is the glow of light. It 
shines into every room. It makes brilliant the 
streets. Even the courtyards are but murkily half 
shadowed. 

But when the lights of New York are mentioned one 
thinks at once and especially of the brilliant lights of 
the theater district. They are the aurora borealis, 
come to Broadway. 

In a general way, as I write, the district of most 
brilliant light is from below 34th Street to above 
59th, with shoots of dazzling brilliancy on some of the 
cross streets. I say, ''as I write," for it is a chang- 
ing city, and in spite of the cutting it in half at Cen- 
tral Park, may within a few years push its dazzling 
brilliancy and its theater crowds still farther up 
Broadway. The dazzling glow is one of the sights 
of the world. One need not say that it is beautiful, 
for it is garish and it is crude ; but it is bold and strik- 

223 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

ing and wonderful. There are the verve and the 
individuality of a city that thinks for itself. 

The lights flare and sparkle and glow in dazzles of 
electricity, on the fronts of buildings, up to the roofs, 
and even far above the roofs on great frameworks. 
There are streams and lines and circles and squares 
and cascades and fountains of light. The lights are 
infinite combinations of red and white and green and 
yellow and orange. And everywhere is the sense 
and glow of movement, of restlessness; everywhere 
is the monstrously fantastic. 

The lights are, of course, advertisements. They 
exploit the claims of theaters and of hotels ; they de- 
clare the alleged merits of corsets and stockings, of 
chewing gum and perfumery, of whiskies and wines, 
of a host of things. Huge flowers, scores of feet in 
height, bloom in topaz and diamond. A kilted High- 
lander, monstrous in fifty or one hundred feet of 
height, dances in shifting lines of fire. Monstrous 
squirrels, of red lights, whirl constantly about within 
monstrous wheels of myriad lights of white. Butter- 
flies and birds of many colors, and of size beyond that 
of the wildest dream, flap their wings and fly. Can- 
non made of lights fire, repetitionally, electric shots 
which burst into sparkling words. And everywhere 
there are brilliant lines and circles and squares and 
masses of light, and everywhere the lights are twink- 
ling or flying with a feverish haste. ''But," as the 
Englishman demanded, when it was described to him, 
** isn't it — ah! — ^very conspicuous?" 

It is very wonderful, all this ; properly considered, 

224 



MIDST PLEASUEES AND PALACES 

it is miraculous ; it is power, it is strength, it is^ ri- 
valry, it is achievement, even though it is feverish, 
garish, gaudy, hectic, flashing, pretentious, ever-rest- 
less—and is not this great city rich in all these quali- 
ties, desirable and undesirable alike ! 

These huge signs, essentially dreadful, essentially 
childish, are but a natural phase of New York devel- 
opment, and they will pass, as other things^ have 
passed. As recently as some twenty years ago it was 
customary to cover the fronts of buildings with huge 
lettered signs, not in lights, but just great plain signs 
of lettered wood with the names of firms and their 
goods set forth in the boldest ugliness, and almost 
entirely covering the unattractive fronts of most of 
the business buildings of that time. But a beautiful 
style of building has come in, and on the best of them 
it has become the New York custom not to have any 
sign at all ; a stranger may seek in vain for even the 
name of the firm itself on some of the largest and most 
exclusive buildings of to-day ; and on scarcely any, ex- 
cept those concerns which cater to a trade without 
standards, is there more than an inconspicuous and 
dignified setting forth of business. The era of those 
old-time lettered signs has gone, and the era of the 
garish electric signs will in time go. 

The lights of Broadway shine on thronging streets 
and sidewalks, on the just and on the unjust, on the 
rich and the poor, the real and the rouged, the happy 
and the miserable, the ruler and the ruled— the fierce 
light beats, as O. Henry expressed it, upon the throne 
and the thrown down. 

225 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

And there is a never-ceasing roar, the mingled 
sound of myriad voices, of myriad feet on the pave- 
ments, of rattling street cars, of countless motors, the 
mingled sound of chirring, grinding, rumbling, whiz- 
zing, rattling, roaring, talking, laughing — it is sight 
and sound run riot ; it is an orgy. 

The great hotels are thronged and busy and the res- 
taurants crowded to the doors. Eleven o'clock 
comes, and there is not the slightest appearance of 
sound or throng diminishing; midnight comes, and 
although there is now some lessening of numbers, 
still the dazzling lights are flaring, still there is a 
ceaseless tramp and surge on the sidewalks, still there 
are hundreds of motor-cars congesting the streets and 
every few minutes held back in long lines at the cross- 
ings. 

Very many of the people have now gone into the 
restaurants, for the feast at midnight is beloved 
of many. The people do not want to leave the 
lights. 

Even the less prosperous, after an evening in the 
cheaper seats at the theaters or at the moving pic- 
tures are reluctant to leave Broadway, and you will 
see them crowding into the cheaper restaurants or 
literally packing the drug stores to revel economically 
in undesired sodas and hot chocolates. 

Thousands who wished to spend money, or at least 
to feel themselves a part of the mad gayety, went 
after midnight to the roof -gardens and cabarets, till 
war made closing rules, and sat at tables and listened 
to gay orchestras, and watched pictorially clad dan- 

226 



MIDST PLEASURES AND PALACES 

cers, and listened to the gayest of singing, and spent 
money to their heart's content. 

The hectic night, the dazzling artificiality— how dif- 
ferent from the clear bright air of the best of New 
York days ! For New York, in every sense, has an 
air ! And its air is crisp, fresh, sparkling, full of life 
and verve, full of power, of inspiration. 

And often, as evening comes on, a wonderful tender 
purple light comes do^vn over the city; it is a light 
that Whistler would have loved and which he would 
have spent his life in painting; it is the light that pre- 
cedes the dusk on a clear fair evening; it is best ap- 
preciated when seen from an upper window and in 
facing the north ; and it enfolds the city in its ethereal 
coloring. The purple light of a perfect New York 
evening is a thing sweetly to fill the imagination and 
the memory. 




227 



CHAPTER XVin 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 




I HERE are so many things 
that point out New York's 
childishness! The constant 
deserting of streets to ad- 
vance to new streets, as 
restless children drop toys 
for the mere sake of picking 
up new ones, the needless 
tearing down of beautiful 
buildings, just as a naughty 
child would tear a beautiful 
picture or book — this, too, is one of the signs of civic 
childishness. There was a distinguished Academy 
of Design on East 23d Street, a building beautiful 
as well as distinguished : when it was dedicated, the 
aged William Cullen Bryant, delivering the princi- 
pal address, felicitated the Academy upon having 
finally, after a number of removals, obtained a per- 
manent home. Permanent! Bryant ought to have 
known his city better! And there have been the 
great granite building of the Lenox Library, which 
vanished from the earth ; the fascinating Gothic halls 
of the University on Washington Square; the de- 

228 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 

serted Colony Club building on Madison Avenue, so 
exquisite and delicate; Madison Square Garden, 
doomed and temporarily reprieved — but I shall not 
itemize further. 

In its extravagance, its luxury, its expensiveness, 
its general carelessness with money, New York is 
like a child that has not learned self-restraint but 
has its pockets well filled. '*We put up prices be- 
cause we know that New Yorkers will pay, ' ' cynically 
said to me the manager of a great establishment. 

New York is in the grasp of a money madness, an 
extravagance of living, not seriously to be checked 
by the World War. And this matter of extrava- 
gance brings to mind two fish set in almost the same 
year before two men: one, Louis the Sixteenth, the 
other. President Washington, when his home was 
on Cherry Hill in New York City. At the last pub- 
lic dinner ever given to Louis the Sixteenth a special 
dish was a carp from the Rhine that for reasons of 
scarcity and transit had cost two thousand livres. 
The King barely tasted it. * ' Take it away, ' ' he said 
with indifference; **I don't care for it." The other 
fish was an early shad from the Delaware that had 
cost four dollars. "Take it away," said the Presi- 
dent sternly; "that was too expensive to buy for 
me." From which it may be seen that Washington 
was not a typical New Yorker, even though he was 
living here, and that Louis the Sixteenth would have 
taken naturally to the ways of the New York rich. 

Even as recently as the beginning of this present 
century, a * ' silk-stocking man ' ' was a term implying 

229 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

pernicious extravagance; but for one New Yorker 
who wore silk stockings then, at least fifty do now. 
The demand for silk stockings for women has im- 
mensely increased; *'whenas in silk my Julia goes" 
has permeated all layers of the social structure, and 
none are so humble as to abjure the real or the near- 
real in hosiery. One single shop tells me that it now 
constantly carries in stock two hundred varieties, in 
size, quality, color and kind, in men's stockings, and 
three hundred in women 's ! 

The city is swept on by a wave of extravagance. 
Money has been made so largely and so easily that 
people have got into the way of spending it largely 
and easily. 

In what are termed the fashionable restaurants, 
which have increased amazingly in number and ex- 
pensiveness, the new national spirit of spending, the 
gay financial heedlessness that makes things dear, 
is markedly apparent in New York, where so many 
come to spend; for twenty times as much money is 
spent in such restaurants as was spent ten years ago. 
It is as if the motto in New York were ''Eat, drink 
and be merry." 

Rents in the city have gone up amazingly, and peo- 
ple pay them with positive happiness : they feel that 
it gives them a touch of importance and distinction 
to pay an enormous rent. 

Extravagance of spending is rampant. And yet, 
there is also a mighty contrast. Great masses of the 
citizens of this great city toil and save : and the total 
deposits in the savings banks continue to increase. 

230 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 

New York is an exceedingly superstitious city, 
because of the immense medley of races in this poly- 
glot city, with the infinite variety of superstitious 
traditions and ramifications brought here from every 
corner of the earth. In this great modern city, the 
very embodiment of twentieth century progress, 
thrives superstition, gray with countless centuries 
of age. 

When the night wind wails through the gorgelike 
streets of the great East Side, thousands tremble, for 
the restless cry is from the souls of children un- 
baptized. Where thick-packed multitudes mass, 
many a charm is said over the sick, many a spell is 
mystically woven, even as spells were whispered and 
charms woven in the forests of Northern Europe, 
centuries ago. Black art has not been banished by 
the electric light. Myths hold their own in spite of 
the railroad and the telegraph. 

Not long ago a quadroon was taken into court for 
preying upon the negroes of the Eighth Avenue col- 
ony. He claimed magic power, and his arrest was 
brought about by a woman whose son remained ill 
despite the virtue of three green seals and a magic 
belt. Recently the will of a German woman, a 
dweller in Stanton Street, was disputed because she 
had profoundly dreaded witches and had hidden 
throughout her clothing incantations to drive the 
witches away. 

It is seldom that the black art of Manhattan at- 
tracts the attention of the law. To find the terrible 
Slav who is in league with the devil, to find the seer 

231 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

who makes a child proof against iDoison by writing 
magic words, in blood, upon its forehead, to find 
the man who in consternation discovered skull and 
crossbones sewed upon his garment, to find where 
love-philters may be bought, with full instructions as 
to their administration, one must patiently come to 
know the mankind of the tenements. 

Ghosts are told of in the crowded region north of 
Grand Street. There are tales of demonology in 
Chinatown. Almshouse dwellers, sitting in the sun, 
watching the surging tide and the glistening water, 
tell of spirits and banshees and fays. 

Curious it is to find, in Essex or Ludlow Street or 
East Broadway, a belief in Lilith, the legendary first 
wife of Adam; but among these East Side women 
who pronounce incantations against her she is not 
Lilith as we know her in Rosetti, marvellously beau- 
tiful and eternally young, snaring the souls of men 
in the meshes of her enchanted hair, but a malicious 
personification of evil, forever watching to steal away 
or injure the new-born child. 

Races that never heard of the predecessor of Eve 
share in the fear that new-born children are liable to 
be stolen away ; they hold that fairies are the thieves, 
and that in the stead of infants taken away there 
are changelings, children deformed, the progeny of 
gnomes. 

There are women who cruelly beat or torture the 
changelings that have been foisted upon them, for 
they hope thus to induce the child-pilferers, from 
very pity for the gnomish offspring, to make restitu- 

232 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 

tion; and there is no doubt that some of the appar- 
ently inexplicable cases of fierce wrath toward chil- 
dren, on the part of sullenly reticent parents, ob- 
scurely root their motives in this grim belief. 

Superstition is seen, luminous in its ineradicability, 
in a little book of necromancy, especially for the sick, 
which is widely studied in the tenements. It tells 
how to make oneself invisible, how to become im- 
pervious to shot, how to cure diseases. That many 
of its rules demand incantations which it is impera- 
tive properly to pronounce, or that there is desig- 
nated some strange substance for medicine, often 
makes necessary the services of a Wise Woman. 

Magic words and letters play their part in these 
dogmas of demonology. The blood of a basilisk, a 
black tick taken from the left ear of v cat, a stone 
bitten by a mad dog, the right eye of a live serpent, 
— such are some of the charms or medicines. 

If one would be secure against shot, the following 
is infallible; but one sees why the interpretative 
Wise Woman must needs be called in ; 

*'0 Josophat; Tomosath; Plasorath! These 
words pronounce Jarot backwards three times." 

It was through the case of a girl who was suffering 
in a shabby little room in a shabby tenement that I 
came to know of this school of necromancy and of 
the crass strength with which it holds sway. The 
girl's foot had been painfully crushed, yet all that 
the mother was doing for her was to have a Wise 
Woman come three times a day and drone over her 
a conjuration. 

233 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Yet the Wise Woman who droned the jargon over 
the poor child's foot was far from witchlike in ap- 
pearance. Of middle age, shrewd, impassive, slow, 
rather short, clean, clad in a plain black go^vn and 
knitted shoulder-cape — the very commonplaceness of 
her appearance gave an additional tang of disquiet. 

It would be a mistake to think the superstitions of 
New York obtain among the ignorant only. The rich 
and the well-to-do dread thirteen at table — the re- 
sult of a superstition which goes back to the Last 
Supper, w^here one was a traitor. In his great paint- 
ing of the Supper, Da Vinci illustrates a prognostic 
in which many in Manhattan have faith — for Judas 
has just upset the salt! Educated men ward off 
rheumatism with horse-chestnuts. The Easter-egg 
custom comes from rites and beliefs of unknown an- 
tiquity. Many, in moving, will not carry away a 
broom. Many count it unlucky to take the family cat 
with them to a new home. Many still put horseshoes 
over their doors — thus recognizing a superstition 
which apparently arose from the w^arding away of 
evil by the horseshoe-shaped blood-splash of the 
Passover. There is a Wall Street broker who must 
have his right cheek shaved first, and the initial 
stroke must be upward. A certain horse-owner is 
confident of success if, on the morning of a race-day, 
'he accidentally meets a cross-eyed man. Many a 
New York matron will under no circumstances re- 
move the wedding-ring from her finger, for dire ill 
luck would come. A New York financier whose name 
is known throughout the world holds active supersti- 

234: 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 

tions in regard to cats. People watch the placing of 
valuables in a cornerstone, without suspecting that 
the custom is thought to have a far-distant necro- 
mantic origin in the use of human beings to 
strengthen buildings and bridges. The original be- 
lief still holds in out-of-the-way corners of the world, 
and many of the Chinese believed the absurd report 
that the Czar of Russia was to safeguard the Man- 
churian railway by means of this ancient form of 
black art. 

The Italians have brought with them the supersti- 
tions of Italy, and belief in demon possession and in 
the evil eye is wellnigh universal among them. A 
leading churchman was believed, by a host of devout 
Italians, to have the power of the evil eye, though 
none believed that he ever wrongfully used it; and 
there are men and women in Roosevelt and Elizabeth 
Streets, about Mulberry Bend and in the Little Italy 
of Harlem, who are held to be the possessors of this 
attribute. 

With the Italians the very commonness of magic 
has rendered imperative and customary a multitude 
of counterbalancing charms, beginning with the 
stringing of certain shapes of coral about the necks 
of children. And there is a way of so holding the 
fingers as to neutralize the evil, the method being to 
fold the two middle fingers into the palm, leaving the 
others projectively pronglike. 

A few years ago an Italian vice-consul went from 
New York to a neighboring to^vn to investigate the 
murder of an Italian there. The slain man, it ap- 

235 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

peared, had sold his soul to the devil, and could at 
any time call that personage to do his bidding. This, 
not unnaturally, had the effect of minimizing the 
popularity of the man, and, in fact, of raising up ene- 
mies against him. The devil, it was learned, had 
made his life secure from steel, poison, or bullets; 
whereupon certain hard-headed compatriots fell upon 
him with clubs and tossed him into a pond to 
drown. 

A curious epidemic of *^ devil frights," which fol- 
lowed each other in the schools of the East Side a 
few years ago, showed a readiness on the part of oth- 
ers than Italians to believe in the personal presence 
of the being that old Petrus Stuyvesant legendarily 
shot with a silver bullet at Hell Gate. Time and 
again, while the epidemic lasted, schoolrooms were 
emptied by a panic following the cry that the devil 
was at the window. 

Among many there is a strange readiness of belief 
that Christians, especially those of certain settlement 
schools, strive by spells and branding-marks to win 
the children of Hebrews from their faith. And one 
evening I met a Hebrew, excited and eager, who told 
me that he had seen with his own eyes the branding 
on a child who attended one of these schools, and he 
offered to take me to see it. 

He led the way to a decrepit rear tenement in 
Orchard Street. Men and women were agitatedly 
huddled in the hallway and upon the shaky stair, and 
others were crowded into an ill-lit room where a tall 
man, broom-bearded and gauntly gaberdined, was 

236 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 

bending over a little girl, upon whose arm had been 
burned the letters "I O D E." 

"lesus Omnium Dominus Est— Jesus is the Lord 
of all," interpreted the old man, gutturally grim. 

The little child, not too little to be proud of the at- 
tention it was exciting, again told the story of how a 
*' black man" had met her in the hallway of the settle- 
ment school, and had seared the marks with a hot 
iron; and at that the room was filled anew with quer- 
ulous Yiddish. 

Yet the explanation was in the adjoining room, 
where a hot fire burned in a cooking-stove; for the 
door of the stove, upon which was the word 
*'M O D E L," was the branding-iron. All of the 
word had been burned upon the child's arm except 
the " L " and the first three strokes of the ' ' M. " The 
girl's brother had pushed her against the stove, and 
had so frightened her with threats that she had feared 
to tell. With the stoicism of the poor, she had suf- 
fered in silence for a while ; and then the mother, dis- 
covering the burn, had leaped at once to the conclu- 
sion that this was the dreaded branding of which she 
had often heard, and the neighborhood had been 
thrown into profound excitement. 

To understand how oddly it came about, print the 
letters ^'I O D E" on a piece of paper; lay the paper, 
with the ink wet, against another, and you will see 
the four letters reversed; turn the slip around, as the 
brand would appear looking down upon it on the arm, 
and you will read the letters in their order, 
"lODE." 

237 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Where all the continents pour their mingling hu- 
man tides — in those thick-populated parts where 
silent Greeks smoke their long-tubed water-pipes, 
where turbaned Hindus bend above their rugs, where 
Lithuanian and Pole, Armenian and Swiss, Austrian, 
Scandinavian, and Slav, throng together — there are 
many strange beliefs. And far down along the East 
Eiver, where great bowsprits stretch far over South 
Street, where there are casks and bales and endless 
rope and chain, you may hear in ancient taverns, nod- 
ding dreamily toward the water, marvelous tales 
from them that go down to the sea in ships, for these 
weather-beaten men retain belief in ancient sailors' 
lore. 

Down in Mott Street, where gleaming lanterns 
swing from the balconies, where the smell of incense 
is in the air, where joss-sticks burn and sallow-faced 
men bow before the figured idol, there is unques- 
tioned belief in fiends and devils, in magic and in 
spells. The silent, watchful men seldom speak to 
you; those who know English are apt to shake their 
heads, and to do business in abbreviations, backed up 
by signs ; but now and then one is found who, if his 
Eastern soul opens, will tell you strange tales of 
things unseen. 

And I remember the case of Lee Gull. He is dead, 
and he died because he was possessed by devils; at 
least that is what the Chinamen of Mott Street firmly 
believe. He had planned to start for China on a 
certain day : instead, he was taken on that day to the 
morgue. 

238 



SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY 

Lee Gull was far from being a handsome man. He 
was stoop-shouldered from a life of toil at the ironing 
table, and his cunning face was creased mth a 
myriad of wrinkles. His almond eyes blinked with 
an elusive sleepiness. His fingers were long and 
claw-like, as if made to grasp money; and, indeed, 
they were typical of his character, for in the thirteen 
years that he had lived in this country he had gath- 
ered enough money to support him in China in afflu- 
ence. 

Devils paid him a visit. They told him to dress 
himself in his holiday attire and go out on Mott 
Street. That is the story that he solemnly told and 
that his countrymen believed. He put on a black 
cap, gayly tasseled, and a plum-colored tunic of silk, 
woven with green dragons, and a pair of wide trous- 
ers of blue satin, and shoes of silk, with soles of felt. 
Lee Gull believed that the shadow of death was upon 
him because of the appearance of the devils, but he 
made no sign of fear. He plunged madly into the 
dissipation of Chinatown, for he wanted to be happy 
as long as the devils would let him. Chinese phi- 
losophy accepts death as a natural incident that is 
not to be greatly feared. 

But his almond eyes took on a strange glare, for 
they were peering into an eternity, that he felt was 
close at hand. To a friend, he said that he had again 
been visited by the devils, and that they directed him 
to go to a certain house, wherein another Chinaman 
had died, and to break in the closed door and go to 
sleep. He knew that the soul of that dead man would 

239 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

come for him, but unresistingly he obeyed the order 
of Fate. He went to the house, broke in the door, lay 
down, and death came lonelily to him just as he had 
foreseen. 






'jMiiilijte 



240 



CHAPTER XIX 



STREETS AND WAYS 

I LIKE to think that Nassau Street- 
named, like William Street adjoining, 
from William the Third— was origin- 
ally the Street of the Pye Woman, and 
that prosaic Exchange Alley was in the 
long ago Oyster Patty Alley, for such 
gastronomic names raise gastronomic 
fancies of the good old days. And 
some, lamenting the passing of any- 
thing of the past, even regret that Tin 
Pot Alley and Shinbone Alley have 
vanished from the street nomenclature 
of New York. 
New York has still its Pearl Street, dating from 
early Dutch days, and its Whitehall Street has come 
down from the White Hall which Governor Stuyve- 
sant built there, and Stone Street is to be forever 
reminiscent of the fact that it was the first New York 
Street to be paved with stone, the time being in the 
late 1600 's. 

The city did away altogether, or nearly so, with 
street names remindful of English royalty, and it 
took a fair proportion of American names, such as 

241 




THE BOOK OF XEW YORK 

"WasMngtou, Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Hamilton, 
and it kept some that came from old Dutch families, 
such as Coenties, Eoosevelt, Stu\'^'esant, Bleecker, 
and it kept that elusive little thoroughfare, Dutch 
Street, but as it expanded it adopted the numbering 
system, which thenceforth did away with colorful or 
charming possibilities. 

Xew York has been frugal with its street names. 
Xot only is there Broadway, but East Broadway and 
West Broadway ; then there are Park Row and Park 
Street and Park Avenue and Park Place; and there 
are many more examples, such as Madison Street and 
Madison Avenue, Greenwich Street and Greenwich 
Avenue. 

One of the unexplainable minor mysteries of New 
York is in reference to this very Greenwich Avenue, 
for, before the Revolution, a monument was placed 
here by admirers of General Wolfe, of Quebec fame : 
the monument being of stone and not lead, it offered 
no temptation for bullet making, and ^Volfe was pop- 
ular and continued to be so, here in America: yet 
that monument completely vanished away, and no ex- 
planation has ever been found as to what could have 
become of it. 

It was a well-known landmark, too, which makes its 
disappearance the more strange. Washington, when 
President, and living in Xew York, set down in his 
diary that one of his favorite drives with Mrs. Wash- 
ington, out from the city, was to this avenue, then a 
country lane, and around the Wolfe monument, 
where he usually turned homeward. 

242 



STREETS AND WAYS 

There are two ways of looking at the New York 
streets. Seen from a lofty window or the top of a 
great office building, they are deep and narrow can- 
yons of great length : I do not know of anything in 
any other city even approaching this almost startling 
effect, except the view down into the deep and nar- 
row streets of Naples from the great height of the 
monastery of San Martino. Seen from the pave- 
ments, the New York streets are likewise canyons: 
and the winds that go sweeping through them are 
frequently fierce canyon-like winds. 

The buildings rise to such terrific heights in story 
after story, and their foundations go down to such 
great depths, in story below story, that a French- 
man declared that New York was always torn up 
with buildings rising to heaven and excavations go- 
ing down to hell. 

A large proportion of the streets of New York are 
always so rough and torn up as to give the impres- 
sion of a frontier town, with everything raw, rough 
and incomplete :— and, after all, this is a frontier 
town, a town on the frontier of Europe, taking in and 
assimilating countless thousands of strangers unac- 
quainted with our institutions and needing to be 
trained in the very basis of our citizenship. 

Always one comes back to the idea that New 
Yorkers are not born but made: they are not born 
New Yorkers, but make themselves New Yorkers: 
broadly speaking, those who do not come here from 
Europe— and 78.6 per cent, are from Europe or of 
immediate European extraction— come here from 

243 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the East or the South or the West of our own 
land. 

New York is a city of transplanted families. It 
is a city where State societies flourish. The Penn- 
sylvania or Ohio Society dinner, the New England 
and California gatherings — if they were all held on 
one night how few New Yorkers would be dining at 
home! 

The '^home town" is not New York, for most of 
the American-born who live here, and allegiance is 
often shown to the old home when death comes, for 
a great proportion of the notices mention burial in 
some distant place. This accounts, I think, for the 
comparatively small importance of the modern ceme- 
teries for the dwellers in Manhattan. 

The streets of New York are such busy and such 
crowded streets! One thinks of the Kentucky girl 
who, at her first sight of a sidewalk throng, thought 
that the mail must have just come in. In a street- 
car I heard, one day, a little girl say to her father, 
**But what are so many people in the street for?" 
And if one could only tell it all, what romance and 
what tragedy there would be, what sorrow and what 
happiness, what touches of the dramatic along with 
the inevitable commonplace! 

Among the business signs on New York streets one 
sees the cryptic, ''Skeletons for Ladies and Gents," 
or wonders, noticing ''Young Housekeepers Sup- 
plied," what they are supplied with or whether 
the supply is of young housekeepers themselves. 
"Black eyes painted" is not the sign of the beauty 

244 



STBEETS AND WAYS 

shop; and of course there are the absurdities of 
"Shoes blacked inside," and "Funerals supplied," 
and "Old Bows rehaired"— and, as if for the would- 
be clever ones, "Good retorts; new and second- 
hand": and what a rushing business that place would 
do if it could really furnish good and original re- 
torts ! 

Over one door I noticed the brave words : "If you 
want it in wood I'll make it"; there are such signs as 
"Connorized music," and "Brushes for advertis- 
ing," and "Paragon Pants Are Art" : and the sign of 
"This is the life," may presumably be taken as an 
invitation to enter a place of amusement. There are 
signs in as many languages as there are races in this 
polyglot town: even Greek is common on such a 
street of general use and traffic as Sixth Avenue. 

On Sixth Avenue, at the corner of 4th Street, is an 
interesting sign, a reminder and memorial of long 
ago, the figure of a golden swan projecting in front 
of the corner of an oldish building— the only figure 
sign that I remember, at present, in the city, al- 
though a few years ago there were two or three oth- 
ers, such as a Moor's head over a drug shop on the 
East Side, and a great gilded bunch of grapes at 
the old Grape Vine at Sixth Avenue and 11th Street. 
But as I write there comes the memory of another 
figure sign, although it isn't really a sign, after all. 
It is the figure of a saint, of a black saint on the front 
of a Roman Catholic Church on West 53d Street, the 
figure, as the dusky brothers and sisters of the par- 
ish, unctuously proud that a black man was a saint 

245 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

of the Church, will tell you, of ''Sain' Benedick' de 
Mooh"! 

Because the street traffic is of greater volume than 
in other cities, there are swifter moving motor-cars 
to obviate the always threatened congestion ; and the 
type of driver is more capable, more alert; and the 
traffic officers are obeyed as swiftly and as completely 
as the much-talked-of English policemen of the 
Strand. 

The number of people who are on the streets is so 
vast, and such great numbers are foreigners of the 
ignorant types who have so largely come within re- 
cent years, and the tenement and apartment-house 
living puts such numbers of children on the streets, 
that, with such totals as there are of vehicles and 
of people, accidents are many. From twenty- 
one to twenty-three thousand people are hurt, on the 
streets of Greater New York, every year, and more 
than a quarter of the number are hurt by automo- 
biles. Of the total injured, from six to eight hun- 
dred are injured fatally. 

In New York, old customs have almost vanished. 
New Year's calling, that pretty New York custom 
which came from the Dutch, and which President 
Washington hoped to see kept up forever, has van- 
ished from here as from the cities which imitatingly 
adopted it: and almost every other old custom has 
also gone. But sugar is still most commonly sold in 
three-and-a-half -pound lots : a strange unit of weight, 
one thinks, until he finds that it is a survival of the 
** stone," this being a quarter of a stone; and eggs 

246 



STREETS AND WAYS 

are still sold, in some of the smaller shops, at so 
many for a quarter, instead of for so much a dozen. 
The knife-and-scissors grinder may still be seen, go- 
ing about with his grindstone with its two wheels 
and two stopping pegs ; the street-organs and street- 
pianos, which only a few years ago were common, 
and to whose music little circles of girls loved pret- 
tily to dance on the pavement, have been mostly 
frowned and licensed away, and no longer do the 
paper-wrapped nickels and pennies fall like the gen- 
tle dew from heaven out of the upper stories of tene- 
ments. 

The streets are noisy in the extreme: many are 
even thunderously noisy: and the general voice is 
in consequence harsh and shrill. 

Motor trucks have not entirely displaced horse- 
drawn trucks, but the old-time horses and carriages of 
pleasure, the old-fashioned family carriages or bug- 
gies or runabouts, are so seldom seen in Manhattan 
as to compel a second look when they pass by. With 
the disappearance of the horse and carriage, there 
has also come about the practical disappearance of 
the hand-pushed baby carriage! Manhattan has 
seen practically the last of it. In the tenement dis- 
tricts, where the children swarm by tens of thou- 
sands, where babies litter the sidewalks, there are 
practically no baby carriages, for there is no room 
for them. A few babies in carriages are still to be 
seen in some of the uptown parks, hovering there 
like fluttered birds in a refuge. In some well-to-do 
sections, the baby carriage has disappeared because 

247 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

there are no babies. The very wealthy enjoy, to 
some degree, the luxury of babies, but with them the 
motor-car and not the baby carriage is used for air- 
ings, or the baby is carried by a highly uniformed 
nurse. 

So unusual is a baby carriage in a rich section, that 
it assumes instant importance when it does appear, 
and recently the question of whether or not, in a so- 
called fashionable apartment house, a family should 
be permitted to wheel the baby out of the front door, 
occupied the attention of one of the Supreme Courts 
for day after day. 

New York, city of tenements and apartment houses 
that it is, possesses a Janitors ' Society, and the sym- 
bol of the association is, naturally and proudly, 
crossed keys and a broom. 

In a growing degree, there has come a natural 
transition, for many New Yorkers, from apartment 
houses to apartment hotels. Fewer wives appear at 
breakfast with their husbands. It is too much 
trouble to keep house. The dweller in an apartment 
hotel escapes the servant problem, escapes the 
plumber and the coal man, does not have to bother 
about house-heating or burglars, about beggars, 
agents, process-servers, undesirable callers of any 
sort. Life is thus made more simple and at the same 
time more lavish. For such results, many a New 
Yorker leads a pigeon-hole existence and sleeps in a 
room so small that he must hold his elbows in. Many 
a seeming duchess in the bright light of restaurant 
life has not where to lay her headgear and must keep 

248 



STREETS AND WAYS 

her hats under her bed. And this adds to the number 
of gay diners-out, the restaurant diners in pubUc 

places. . 

The great amount of extravagant dinmg-out, m 
New York, accounts for the absence, or at least the 
great shortage, of fine pastry and ice cream supply 
shops, such as abound in Philadelphia and Boston. 
Nor are meat and game markets numerous, of the 
kind that cater to wealthy living. Wealthy homes, 
whether separate houses or apartments, which still 
do most of their own cooking, are comparatively few 
and growing fewer, and the hotels and famous res- 
taurants and clubs have wholesale supply houses and 
sources of food that are not in retail evidence. 

No other city of the world has so many great 
stores, huge department stores, for retail trade, as 
New York City. At the same time, street after street 
is full of tiny little places of trade, offering myriad 
kinds of merchandise to the small buyers. This is 
largely because the great stores close at half-past 
five or six, partly because many poor people feel 
that they are not welcome in the palatial stores, and 
to quite an extent because hosts of people do not live 
very near the department stores; although I remem- 
ber hundreds of little shops, apparently prosperous, 
within a very few blocks of the great places. 

There are a great number of picturesque little 
shops, reached, perhaps, by going down basement 
steps, or up passageways, the shops of expert arti- 
sans of idiosyncrasies, oldish men, of foreign birth, 
who work in wood or metals. And there are great 

249 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

shedlike places, far over at the western edge of Man- 
hattan and far over at the eastern, where you may 
buy any kind of wreckage from destroyed buildings ; 
doors and windows, cornices, pillars, mantelpieces. 

I think that it is not realized to what an extent 
people are constantly scattering, away from New 
York; that it is not just a matter of coming here. 
The whirling city exerts not only centripetal force 
but centrifugal. The disappointed, disillusioned, 
dispirited are constantly giving up the struggle; 
many others depart, not because of failure or ill- 
health, but because they think they see a particular 
success in some other place. But although the out- 
going movement is always strong it is far from 
equaling the incoming. 

New York exerts a tremendous appeal upon the 
ambitious and the restless ; and markedly, therefore, 
it has been drawing to itself the newest of the "new 
women." And here the "new woman" is a sign and 
a symbol of change, contending, in the everyday as- 
pects of her life, for what she deems desirable free- 
dom, deeming social guards to be but old-fashioned 
restrictions, considering herself her o^vn best pro- 
tector. In Boston, the "new woman" is self-pos- 
sessed, busily occupied, competent, looking on eman- 
cipation as giving the chance for independent work, 
and extremely glad to run back home over Sunday. 
In New York the "new woman" is to a great extent 
a very young woman indeed, probably just out of col- 
lege, and she much prefers to take a bachelor-girl 
apartment and consider father and mother and home 

250 



STEEETS AND WAYS 

a closed issue. There are, of course, many excep- 
tions; but the Boston type, deeming a visit home a 
privilege, and the New York most prominent type, 
deeming home a place from which to escape, stand as 
the representatives of an important movement. 

New York real estate is supposed to be among the 
very best possible of investments, a sure thing in an 
investment world of uncertainties, the only question 
being as to the amount of profit. 

And New York has undoubtedly given many a man 
millions, and the story of one of the early invest- 
ments of John Jacob Astor is illustrative. He sold 
a lot on Wall Street for eight thousand dollars, and 
after the sale was completed the purchaser said with 
a smile of triumph that he had secured a bargain, for 
in a few years he would be able to sell that lot for 
twelve thousand dollars, whereupon Astor replied: 
''Yes, but with your eight thousand dollars I shall 
buy eighty lots above Canal Street which, when your 
lot is worth twelve thousand dollars, will be worth 
eighty thousand dollars." And they were. 

But although there may be profit and although 
there has often been very great profit, there may be 
stagnation or even heavy loss. The very chances of 
business and of living that pile up huge fortunes for 
some, tear down the fortunes of others. Many a 
business block, giving a splendid income for years, 
finds its revenue so falling off that it is sold for its 
mortgage and fetches far less than the mortgage. 
Many a once prosperous apartment house has seen 
its rents dwindle to less than interest and taxes. 

251 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Many a house is deemed not worth the cost of altera- 
tions, and in its fall in value drags down its neigh- 
bors. Only recently the owners of an apartment 
house looking out over Washington Square decided, 
rather than meet some looming expenses, to turn it 
into a loft building for light manufacturing — an ap- 
palling possibility for one of the most charming quar- 
ters of New York. In this case disaster was averted 
because of great improvements near by, which re^ 
vived residential values. 

Scattered through old New York are many build- 
ings which are shabby and gloomy, out of repair and 
perhaps half closed and half used. The curious fact 
in regard to many of them is that they belong to 
lost heirs or have a title tied up by litigation. Such 
facts explain some shabby blocks of tenements and 
some ''haunted houses." These old estates stand 
unimproved, with no available money to put new 
buildings on the land and with no prospective pur- 
chaser desirous of ''buying a lawsuit." 

New York has always been a city of costly living. 
The dashing Knox, passing through New York in 
1775 on his way to Crown Point and Ticonderoga for 
guns for Boston, notes in his diary that he is "glad 
to leave New York, it being very expensive." And 
it seems to be illustrative of New York that, just 
the other day, when one of the banks moved its offices 
from one building to another a block and a half away, 
it took out, to cover possible loss in transit of money 
or securities, an insurance policy, for twenty-four 
hours, for the sum of ninety millions of dollars. 

252 



STREETS AND WAYS 

New York has a rich class who feel no sense of 
noUesse oUige in regard to the poor of the city.^ To 
them the poor are aliens and strangers. There is no 
bond of having grown up together, of even the fore- 
fathers of one class having worked for the forebears 
of the other, of both classes having mutually looked 
on at the development of the city. The two classes 
do not know each other. The rich stay in their part 
of the city and the poor stay in theirs, and there is 
no harmony or happiness common to them. 

And I think this is sho^vn, with peculiar clearness, 
in the attitude of the well-to-do New Yorker toward 
the city itself in the hot summer months. He is him- 
self away all summer if he can manage it, and at 
least for a long vacation; and, besides the vacation, 
he either runs out of the city every night during the 
hot term or at least every week-end, dividing his 
enforced time in the city between his office and his 
club: to him, the city is ''closed up": nobody is at 
home : he is absolutely sincere in his belief. Yet he is 
quite mistaken, for New York's toiling millions are 

still there ! 

In the matter of actual charity New York is gen- 
erous. No city in the world gives so much and so 
freely There are enormous hospitals given by in- 
dividual wealth or built by the city; there are huge 
charitable institutions in infinite variety; every- 
where that one looks or walks there is some chari- 
table building with millions of an endowment. There 
is, too, an increasing centralization of giving, under 
the name of efficiency. Yet the fact remams that 

253 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

poverty does not decrease, in spite of the increase of 
charity. In any other line of activity such a fact 
would be looked upon as a condemnation of methods. 
Any business man facing a condition of increased ex- 
penditure without increased results would set him- 
self to some kind of change. 

There seems to be no doubt that more than half a 
million people in Greater New York are recipients of 
some form of charity. 

One of the most notable charities is Sailors' Snug 
Harbor, whose founder, Captain Richard Randall, 
gave a great acreage, northeast of Washington 
Square, a little over a century ago, to be adminis- 
tered for the benefit of a home for old American 
sailors. The land is never to be sold, but rented: 
the property has become so valuable that more than 
seven hundred old sailors are cared for from the in- 
come, in the buildings of the Snug Harbor, which are 
great dignified pillar-fronted structures, on Staten 
Island, looking out over the water of the Kill van 
Kull : and in founding the bequest the donor directed 
that the sailors should never be deemed paupers, but 
liis heirs. 

There is an organization that sends libraries to 
sea on ships ; another was founded to relieve victims 
of shipwreck; another is restricted to the care of 
needy sailors of the vanishing, full-rigged, ocean- 
going ships ! 

One society furnishes "foster housewives," to 
scrub floors, wash dishes, wash and dress the chil- 
dren, when mothers are sick. Another gives vaca- 

254 



STREETS AND WAYS 

tions to ''nurses, teachers and governesses" in need 
of them. Another gives outings to little girls whose 
mothers give them the care of littler ones. 

A fund was established, far back in 1798, and is 
still administered, for the benefit of industrious 
widows of good character, with at least two children 
under the age of twelve; the widows, so it is carefully 
specified, not to be totally destitute but able to aid 
somewhat in their own support. 

One philanthropist specializes in filling the uncon- 
ventional want: the pair of shoes, the glass eye, the 
pair of spectacles, the set of teeth. Which is remind- 
ful that New York dentists are often asked to buy 
the gold fillings out of the teeth of hard-luck unfor- 
tunates, ^oj 
At the southern edge of Greeley Square, on S6d 
Street near Broadway, is an unobtrusive fountain 
(its existence threatened, when last I noticed it, by 
subway work), to the memory of Jerry McAuley, 
who founded, in 1872, near the waterside, between 
Cherry Hill and the East Eiver, a mission which is 
continuing the noble work that he nobly began that 
of helping those who are absolutely down and out, 
men and women who are hungry, who have perhaps 
been criminals, who are probably drunkards. Mc- 
Auley had himself been down and out, and he knew 
the needs of those who could not qualify as respect- 
able and sober citizens. _ 

A little west of Broadway, in the vicinity ot Canal 
Street, is a barbers' school: and as the students must 
practice, and can scarcely charge for practicmg, they 

255 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

cut hair, and shave, free of charge : and a pitiful line 
of men wait their turn, men literally without a cent, 
many of them, and all without a cent to spare : and 
almost more pitiful than to see the waiting line is to 
see the new life and hope with which the men, fur- 
bished and rejuvenated, step out again into a world 
that would not hire them unkempt and unshaven. 

That is doing good, without being in tlie least a 
charity. And as to other good that is done without 
ostentation and not in the least as charity, I look on 
the tallest building of the city — the tallest of the 
world — as the finest of exemplars, for it was built 
by the man who, in his vast series of stores, sells 
things for five and ten cents, making it possible for 
those of straitened means to buy, with self-respect, 
many a needful thing wiiich they would otherwise 
have to do without. 

On East 68th Street are the buildings of what is 
among the sweetest and most beautiful of all chari- 
ties. It is the New York Foundling Hospital, and, 
as its name implies, it receives children who have no 
parents, children whose parents cannot or will not 
care for them, hapless and helpless infants, victims 
of poverty or crime. 

The Foundling Hospital began modestly in 1869 
down on East 12th Street, and the first infant was 
left on the opening day about dusk, and was sur- 
veyed with wonder and pity by the Sisters, who in- 
stantly decided that it should be called Joseph Vin- 
cent, in honor of St. Vincent de Paul, the special 
patron of forgotten infants : and their disappointment 

256 



STREETS AND WAYS 

was great to discover a scrap of paper pinned to the 
infant's clothing asking that it be christened Sarah. 

From the first, and until recent years, ^ a little 
swinging open-work crib of wicker stood just out- 
side of the door, and it was the privilege of any 
mother who so wished to leave her child in the crib 
and hurry off unknown in the darkness. Always, 
night and day, there has been a Sister on watch at 
the door ready to take at once any child left there. 
It was some years ago decided that the swinging 
crib should be set just inside of the door, instead of 
outside, and now a mother must at least be seen, and 
may then if she chooses go off into the darkness and 
leave her child forever. 

The institution receives and cares for an average 
of twenty-five hundred infants annually, and in the 
half century of its existence has received a total of 
over sixty-five thousand. 




257 



CHAPTER XX 



THE REGION OF KrVERSIDE 




T is one of life's little ironies that 
the most romantically distinctive 
and distinctively romantic of Bos- 
ton movements should have resulted 
in giving to New York three of its 
most notable citizens. For the 
movement was that bravely breezy 
movement of Brook Farm, which 
in the promised and picturesque 
practicality of its prospects drew the attention of all 
America and stood for the best of Boston. George 
William Curtis was a Brook Farmer, he of whom it 
has been so well said that he was superbly artificial 
yet that his artificiality was natural ; and his literary 
fame is that of his beloved city of New York. 
Charles A. Dana was a Brook Farmer, and his fame 
is linked with the rise and power of the paper into 
which he flung his superb vitality. Isaac Thomas 
Hecker was a Brook Farmer : and afterwards he be- 
came a Catholic and entered the priesthood, and, the 
fire of originality still glowing in his heart, as in the 
hearts of the few others of the remarkable group, he 
planned the foundation of an order of priests whose 

258 



THE REGION OP EIVERSIDE 

native tongue should be English. He founded the 
order of St. Paul the Apostle, commonly known as 
the Paulist Fathers, and the church of the order is a 
structure of stone, on Columbus Avenue a little north 
of 59th Street, a building of solemn and impressive 
interior, with groined ceiling showing all the stars in 
the heavens in the very position in which they stood 
at the time of the dedication of the church. 

In New England, Brook Farm made ''The Blithe- 
dale Romance. ' ' In New York it made the New York 
''Sun," and "Prue and I," and the Paulist Fathers. 

A little to the north and west of this huge church, 
near the North River, is an unsavory tenement re- 
gion, of mingled whites and blacks, known in frequent 
reports of police activities, as San Juan Hill; and 
there is a great tangle of railroad switching tracks — 
and all at once, at 72d Street, begins the superbly 
beautiful Riverside Drive. 

But there is a delightful way of reaching the Drive, 
by following 72d Street, which, between Central Park 
and Riverside, is maintained by the city as practically 
itself a parkway. 

Riverside Drive runs for miles along the Hudson, 
bordered on one side by homes and even more by 
great apartment houses, and on the other side by a 
beautiful park and the river. 

Riverside Drive is not straight; it is far from 
straight, and thereby is its beauty greatly enhanced. 
It curves and bends unceasingly, it dips in long and 
sweeping grades and climbs with easy swings. And 
always it is well above the Hudson, always it offers 

259 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

views of sweet superbness. And here and there is 
an admirably placed monument, such as the Soldiers ' 
and Sailors' or that to General Sigel. 

Not only is the Drive bordered by buildings with 
indications of plethora of wealth and comfort, but 
the streets leading from it give likewise an aspect of 
admirable living. Noticeable almost at the begin- 
ning of the Drive is the house of Charles A. Schwab, 
a costly and beautiful structure, and Chenonceaux- 
like in effect, even though so far above the water 
instead of, like its Touraine prototype, standing upon 
and over a stream. 

The view is fine and fair and far expanding. 
There is the splendid sweep of water; there are the 
dark green heights, across the river; in the distance 
is the splendid Indian Head. It is a view with a 
sense of somberness, a view of sober beauty, a view 
suggesting strength and might, a wonderful view for 
a city. 

Under a brilliant sun the same view flashes at you 
like a view unsheathed. Yachts and motor-boats dot 
the water. Great warships sway gently at anchor. 
Go up the river, for miles, and it is more and more 
to be seen how unceasingly the city is using, for joy 
and pleasure, this superb river beside which it is set. 

Evening comes on, and the heights across the 
stream are of a purple beauty, and the water glim- 
mers mistily, and into the view there comes a subtle 
weirdness. And there are splendid sunsets across 
the water, splendid sunsets trailing clouds of glory. 

Eiverside Drive is the most beautiful city drive of 

260 



THE EEGION OF EIVERSIDE 

any city in the world, the drive that is the most filled 
with varied charm and fine beauty, a drive that is 
beautiful by night and day; and a fine way to enjoy 
it is to ride on the top of one of the great motor 
buses that run over here from Fifth Avenue and go 
out beyond Grant's Tomb. 

Late one afternoon, opposite 80th Street, an elderly 
agitated woman hurried up to a policeman, and she 
pointed up into a tree, and her voice quaveringly 
rose as she declared that her eyeglasses were up 
there! This was an emergency not provided for in 
his instructions. But he began to talk soothingly to 
her. ''But I mean it!" she cried. ''My eyeglasses 
are really there ! "—Whereupon he looked where she 
pointed and there her glasses dangled. "I was on 
the front seat of that stage and a branch caught 

them ! " — 

Opposite 122nd Street, in a great open space, in 
the center of the parkway, rises Grant's Tomb, a 
structure of massiveness, of balanced lines, of grave 
proud dignity. 

It was Grant's own desire that his body should rest 
somewhere in New York City, and the committee that 
assumed charge thought at first of Central Park. But 
some obstacles developed, whereupon it was decided 
to set it upon a certain street-corner space— but this 
idea was hastily abandoned when it was noticed that 
if put there it would face a cancer hospital : for it was 
remembered that Grant died of cancer. Then River- 
side was chosen, and this spot fixed upon : and there 
could not be a nobler and more fitting site, with the 

261 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

park itself, with its greenery and paths and throngs, 
the noble breadth of river, the warships that often 
lie here at anchor, the splendid up-stream stretch of 
beauty to the empur]pled hills of the distances; and, 
close by the great monument, the little grave, which 
by a century antedates it, of the "amiable child"! 

Grant's Tomb is a massive structure, Grecian in de- 
sign, measuring ninety feet on each side, and rising, 
above the Doric faces of the square lower portion, in 
circular constructions which decrease to a conical top 
one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. 

The interior aims frankly at an effect of splendid 
dignity similar to that gained by the interior of the 
tomb of Napoleon. The sarcophagus is hewn from a 
single block of red porphyry, and it rests in a crypt 
down into which the visitors look from an encircling 
gallery. And, high above the sarcophagus, rises a 
stately dome. 

Near the spot where stands this tomb much of the 
Battle of Harlem Heights was fought, and it went to 
its bitterly contested finish in the nearby locality, just 
off Riverside Drive, where now stand the buildings of 
Columbia University. Measured by numbers of men 
engaged it was not much of a battle. But it was a 
victory at a time when victory was sorely needed, and 
it is therefore finely memorable, even though no mil- 
lions of men were engaged and although the total 
American loss was but a hundred and fifty men, with 
that of the British a little more. 

Columbia University began its history in 1754, far 
down in lower Manhattan, as King's College, and its 

262 



THE REGION OF RIVERSIDE 

most famous student was Alexander Hamilton. The 
Revolution gave it its still continuing patriotic name, 
and the first to graduate, under the new name of 
Columbia, was De Witt Clinton. 

The university buildings are of competent, capable 
aspect, and the library building, with its great dome, 
is a very beautiful structure, built with terraces and 
approaches and with an air of having plenty of room, 
something which is not characteristic of many New 
York buildings. It is indeed a most notable building, 
splendidly imposing. 

The university graduates over two thousand stu- 
dents each year; and it is curious that so great an 
institution should seem to have so little to do with the 
life of the city. New York is so big and so preoccu- 
pied with its own progress, that it absorbs, in incon- 
sequential fashion, even such an enormous institution 
as this. The city does not neglect it, does not ignore 
or belittle it, but simply does not, as a city, pay much 
attention to it. The name of the president is recog- 
nized as familiar whenever mentioned, and the fact 
that the university exists, ^vith a huge attendance, is 
known, but beyond that the attitude of New York is 
one of readiness to notice important work if any one 
connected with the university shall perform it. 

This attitude toward Columbia represents the city's 
attitude toward the several other big institutions of 
learning which are located here : A * ' Harvard man ' * 
means a good deal in Boston ; a **U. of P. man" means 
a good deal in Philadelphia ; but New York refuses to 
consider university or college men as, in themselves, 

263 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

important entities. Even the Hall of Fame, kept up 
solemnly under the auspices of the University of the 
City of New York, is little regarded here except as an 
admirably designed building, for it does not repre- 
sent fame that has been accorded by New York. 

On Riverside Drive, a little north of Grant's Tomb, 
is the Claremont, a building a century and a quarter 
old, but altogether altered from its original aspect by 
galleries and porches. It was occupied in 1807 by 
Viscount Courtenay, afterwards Earl of Devon, who 
from this Claremont (named from the estate of 
Prince William, Duke of Clarence, years afterward 
to be King William the Fourth), watched the first 
passage up the Hudson of Fulton's steamboat, the 
Clermont. One notices how the English titles roll 
up! A few years later Joseph Bonaparte occupied 
this building. Now it is a restaurant, owned by the 
city. 

The beautiful Drive extends for several miles be- 
yond Grant's Tomb, to the very end of Manhattan, at 
Spuyten Duyvil; and nothing in the growth of New 
York is more striking than the recent development, 
made possible by the subway, of that high-set river- 
side region. 

Not far inland from the Drive, at 156th Street and 
Broadway, is a building which suggests what fasci- 
nating variety of interest a great city may offer ; for 
here is the Hispanic Museum, a long, low, beautiful 
building, filled with examples of Spanish art: here 
are the glories of old Spain : here are Spanish paint- 
ings by Velasquez and Murillo and Goya: here are 

26-1 



THE REGION OF RIVERSIDE 

lusters of iridescent loveliness, here are wrongM- 
iron work and incomparable carvings in Spanish 
leather — it is the best that the arts and artists and 
artisans of old Spain can show. 

Returning to the Drive, it becomes a road at the 
foot of heights; opposite 175th Street it passes 
little Fort Washington Park; a little above this, by 
leaving the Drive and climbing the hill. Fort Wash- 
ington itself may be reached, about opposite 187th 
Street. This is the highest point of Manhattan Is- 
land, the land being two hundred and seventy feet 
above tidewater. 

Parts of the earthworks of the fort are still to be 
seen, for private ownership of an estate has pre- 
served them, and it has recently been announced that 
one of the wealthiest of New Yorkers has purchased 
a great tract, including Fort Washington, with the 
intent of turning all of it over to the city to be a pub- 
lic park forever. 

It is strange to find, within the limits of Manhattan 
Island, the earthwork walls of Fort Washington still 
in existence, amid oaks and maples and black locusts 
and horse-chestnuts and umbrella-magnolias that 
have freely grown up here. Grass grows deep and 
lush, and it is a spot of wild beauty, with constantly 
the splendid presence of the Hudson down at the foot 
of the steep height. It will still be beautiful, if it be- 
comes a park, but presumably the wildness will dis- 
appear. 

On a November day of 1776 this fort was attacked 
by the British in numbers much greater than those of 

265 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the garrison, although the garrison was more than 
three thousand men. General Greene was in com- 
mand and had delegated the charge of the fort to 
Colonel Magaw. Washington had strongly advised 
Greene to evacuate the fort, but had left the matter to 
his discretion, Greene being a highly trusted officer. 
The British, attacking, advanced with intrepidity, and 
a desperate defense could not check them. They 
stormed onward, killing many and capturing those 
who remained, and thus won control of the river. 

Washington, deeply concerned, had hurried back 
from a journey of insj)ection up into the Highlands, 
to look over the situation in person, learning that the 
fort was in peril; he reached Fort Lee, on the New 
Jersey side of the river, across from Fort Washing- 
ton, and from that point saw that the attack was 
actually in progress. He saw the lines of British 
sweeping up to and over the redoubts — these very 
redoubts that are still here ! He saw, through a tele- 
scope, many of his men bayoneted after throwing 
down their arms and surrendering. He rushed to a 
boat, leaped in, and ordered the rowers to row des- 
perately. The river is here of great width, and be- 
fore he got to Fort Washington he met a boat con- 
taining General Greene, who had himself hastened 
across the river to the aid of his subordinate, Magaw, 
but had turned back when he saw that actually to land 
would be but futile. 

Washington's grief and anger were for a few min- 
utes unrestrained. It was one of the few times in his 
life that he permitted his passionately strong feelings 

266 



THE REGION OF RIVERSIDE 

to show. He wept with rage ; he furiously swore ; it 
was one of those swearing fits when those near by, if 
they were wise, made way ; he blindly wanted to go on, 
as at Murray Hill, and force back the British single- 
handed; but soon he controlled himself and ordered 
his men to row back to the farther side. And what he 
said to Greene, who was not in a position to make way, 
but had to listen, must have made that officer regret 
a number of things and spend an extraordinarily un- 
happy quarter of an hour. 

You may still see about where the two boats must 
have met — just down there, somewhat on the New 
York side of the river. 




267 



CHAPTER XXI 



TO JTJMEL AXD TAX COKTLANDT 




timL 



OTHIXG better illustrates 
the changes that have grad- 
ually come over New York 
City than the changes in the 
location of the churches. 
That St. Patrick's Cathe- 
dral should go from Prince 
Street to 50th is one of the 
illustrative touches, but 
there are many other 
~~^^fe=. churches which have moved 

"^^ a number of times with the 

changing of the character of the surrounding popula- 
tion. 

An excellent example is a German Reformed 
Church which long ago, in 175S, stood far down on 
Nassau Street. After many years it moved to For- 
syth Street, and after a while, following another shift 
in population, to Norfolk. And in 1897 it moved to 
68th Street, far over toward the East River, in what 
had become a German settlement. 

The church is very clean, it is shiningly varnished, 
and its tower holds a bell which was sent over as a 

268 



TO JUMEL AND VAN CORTLANDT 

gift because of the interesting connection of this Ger- 
man Eef ormed Church with a great man of the Revo- 
lution. 

In the vestibule is set a mural cenotaph, which was 
first set within the old church on Nassau Street, and 
which has accompanied the church in each of the steps 
of its migration. It is a most romantic looking thing 
in a most unromantic looking building, and it is in 
honor of that distinguished soldier, Baron Steuben, 
who did so much to aid the Americans, and who, when 
the Revolution was over, lived like a feudal prince on 
the great estate which was granted him in Central 
New York, coming down to the city frequently to see 
and be entertained by his friends, who were in turn 
generously entertained at his country-seat. 

The mural memorial, with its oddly pointed top, 
sets forth in long recitation his virtues and achieve- 
ments, with the statement that "the highly polished 
manners of the Baron were graced by the most noble 
feelings of the heart." It states also that he was a 
Knight of the Order of Fidelity ; and it may be men- 
tioned that the cross, surrounded by diamonds, which 
he loved to wear on his breast and which is so famil- 
iarly known from his portraits, was the cross of this 
order, and that it was given him by the Prince Mar- 
grave of Baden. 

The one who placed the memorial to Steuben in the 
original church was willing to remain himself un- 
known; and merely closed his lengthy eulogy with 
the statement that the memorial was set there by one 
**who had the honor to be his aide-de-camp, the happi- 

269 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

ness to be his friend." And in the course of time 
and of migrations the church itself has quite forgot- 
ten the name of the original donor, who was Colonel 
William North, an officer of notable bravery. 

Baron Steuben w^as among the most delightfully 
interesting of men. Everybody loved him. One of 
the few recorded conversations in which Mrs. Wash- 
ington figures, was a conversation with Steuben in 
regard to a fishing experience in the Hudson River. 
"And what did you catch I" ''A whale, my lady," 
was the reply. "A whale!" was the astonished ex- 
clamation. "A whale! You caught a whale in the 
Hudson River at New York!" ''Yes, my lady." 
But soon it was discovered that the delightful Baron 
had been misled by his limited knowledge of English 
and that he had no intention of rivaling that other 
baron, Munchausen, and that what he had caught was 
in reality but an eel. 

When Steuben died, at his lonely log house built 
within his sixteen thousand acres, he was buried in a 
lonely grave in the forest, with but a handful of 
mourners accompanying his body. And it is pleasant 
to think that he is kept in mind, in New York City, 
by this curiously peripatetic memorial. 

Where this church stands is in oncewhile York- 
ville, well on the way toward Harlem. The nucleus 
of the district known as Harlem, which in popular 
fancy stands as peculiarly representative of the apart- 
ment dwellers of New York, and which is generally 
taken to mean that part of Manhattan Island north of 
Central Park and as far as 155th Street (the region 

270 



TO JUMEL AND VAN CORTLANDT 

beyond that, where the island narrows between the 
Harlem River and the Hudson, being known as Har- 
lem Heights and Washington Heights), was a little 
settlement which was given this name by Governor 
Stnyvesant, who, when a committee came before him, 
each man urging, amid clouds of tobacco smoke, that 
the settlement be named after his own native Dutch 
town, took the matter under sage advisement and, re- 
flecting finally that none of the urgent committeemen 
was from Haarlem, deemed it wise to use that name, 
to avoid jealousies ; and Haarlem, but without one of 
the "a's," it has since remained, in its expanded area. 

A little northwest of the northwest corner of Cen- 
tral Park, on a lowish cliff above Morningside Park, 
is the new Episcopalian Cathedral, now under con- 
struction, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The 
cornerstone was laid a quarter of a century ago; its 
final stone will not be laid for perhaps half a century 
still to come. Its tallest tower will rise to the height 
of 455 feet. The total cost of the structure — this must 
be mentioned, or it would not seem like New York — 
is to be more than six million dollars. 

Massive, huge in bulk, rising with much of mediaeval 
promise, it already gives indications of impressive- 
ness. In magnitude of conception it rivals the great 
cathedrals of the old world. As planned, it is to be 
of the immense length of 520 feet ; six feet longer than 
the Cathedral of Canterbury! The continued con- 
struction of this mighty structure will be watched with 
interest not only by New York but by all America. 

Twenty-five blocks due north from this, at West 

271 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

ISStli street, at the edge of a rocky cliff, is the Col- 
lege of the City of New York, a widespreading mass 
of buildings, high-placed but not themselves high, im- 
pressive in their Tudor style, really beautiful in 
strong-contrasting dark and white, with a main tower, 
impressive and dignified, standing in domination of 
far-flung pinnacles and crockets and gables. 

The buildings are of native rock, and there is free 
use along the corners and around the windows and 
doorways of what looks like white stone but which is 
really glazed terra-cotta. In all, the buildings give an 
Oxford-like impression, and have beauty and distinc- 
tion, with their muUioned windows, their gargoyles, 
their towers, their pointed gables of stone, their fine 
doorways, their admirable design throughout. All 
they need now, to make them still more like Oxford, 
is a few centuries of existence and a long list of 
famous names associated with them. 

At 160th Street, on a height above the Harlem 
River, stands a beautiful mansion, which has stood 
on this commanding height for more than a century 
and a half. Its outlook is widespread. As an ad- 
vertisement for its sale, as far distant as 1792, ex- 
pressed it : * * The house commands an extended view 
of the Hudson, of the East River, the Harlem River, 
Hell Gate, and the Sound. In front is seen the city 
of New York, and the high hills on Staten Island, dis- 
tant more than twenty miles. To the left are seen 
Long Island, Westchester, Morrisania, and the village 
of Harlem with its cultivated surrounding fields. ' ' 

The house was built by a British officer. Colonel 

272 



TO JUMEL AND VAN CORTLANDT 

Eoger Morris, as a home for himself and his bride, 
that Mary Philipse whom Washington, as a young 
man, had warmly wooed : and in refusing George, who 
was to inherit a beautiful home in a superb situation, 
and in accepting Roger, Mary Philipse at least chose 
a man who could put up a beautiful home in a superb 
situation. It was a home of wealth. Pillar-fronted, 
balconied, fan-windowed, the house stands on its lofty 
height in sweet serenity. 

^hen the Revolution came, Morris and his wife fled 
to England, and this property was confiscated. For a 
month and a half it was Washington's headquarters 
previous to the loss of Fort Washington ; and a tradi- 
tion — difficult to adjust, as to time, with the Fort 
Washington and Harlem Heights fighting — has it that 
a young woman, a very pretty vivandiere, approached 
him, at this house, and, reverently touching him on 
the arm (*' reverently '^ is the word that has come 
down with the story), whispered to him what must 
have been a warning, for he and his staff were off like 
the wind, and in a few minutes a British regiment 
(tradition retains even the name of the regiment, 
which was the 42nd Highlanders, the famous Black 
Watch!) came creeping up the rocks, intent on a sur- 
prise and capture. 

The charming house, so charmingly set, has always 
maintained an atmosphere of fine living, except for 
some years following the war and the confiscation. 
It was during this period of neglect, when a farmer 
was in charge as caretaker, that Washington one 
day planned a delightful picnic. He and Mrs. 

273 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

"Washington drove out to Fort Washington : — it seems 
odd that he should have chosen a place of such tragic 
and unhappy memories for a picnic, but, presumably, 
it was on account of the mighty changes that had come 
that he chose the spot : for the United States had been 
established and recognized and he was its President 
on this day in July of 1790. The picnic party that 
gathered at the fort included John Adams, the Vice- 
President, and his wife, and General Knox, the Secre- 
tary of War, and his wife, and Alexander Hamilton, 
Secretary of the Treasury, and his wife, and Thomas 
Jefferson, Secretary of State, then a widower, his 
wife, who had worked and planned with him in the 
building of wonderful Monticello, having died. 

The picture of these great and charming folk pic- 
nicking out here, on the highest point of Manhattan, 
and wandering about the redoubts, and talking of what 
had already become ''old times," is one to fascinate 
the fancy. And after a while, all left Fort Washing- 
ton, and drove over here to what we now call the Jumel 
Mansion, and there a formal dinner was served, with 
Washington as host, he having ordered it sent out 
from the city. One may joresume that the thought 
must frequently have come to him, that he was in the 
house which had been the home of one whom he would 
gladly have made his wife ; and it may equally be pre- 
sumed that this was a fact which had never entered 
into his confidences with the agreeable Widow Custis, 
and did not now enter into his spoken recollection in 
the presence of the stately and still agreeable Mrs. 
Washington. 

274 



TO JUMEL AND VAN CORTLANDT 

But the associations most strongly connected with 
the house are those connected with the remarkable 
Jumels. For Stephen Jumel and his wife were indeed 
remarkable people. They had personality. They im- 
pressed themselves. 

Jumel was a French merchant doing business in 
New York. He bought this house in 1810. He had 
married an American woman of whose antecedents 
and personal history little was generally known, but 
there seems to have been no real ground for malicious 
stories which rival hostesses loved to whisper. Jumel 
and his wife became prominent as entertainers of the 
most distinguished foreign visitors to New York, and 
it was this remarkable success which made some rivals 
gossipingly ungenerous. 

The Jumels were rich. They were clever. They 
were likable. They were people of fine taste, and had 
lovingly repaired the fine old building, and restored 
it, just as it deserved to be repaired and restored. 
They could make themselves desired by great and 
brilliant folk, and they were themselves brilliant 
folk. 

Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain and of Naples, 
was entertained at this house by the Jumels. So was 
the King of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte. So was 
the Prince de Joinville. Lafayette was a guest here 
in 1825. And these were but a few of the great ones. 
Louis Napoleon was Madame Jumel 's guest here, 
in 1837, Stephen Jumel having died, and Napoleon 
went to France, assisted by her money, to make one 
of his earlier attempts for rulership there. General 

275 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

Sherman, in Civil War days, was among the latest of 
celebrities to be a Jumel guest. 

Jumel himself died in 1S32. He and his wife had 
shone socially in the best circles in Paris as well as in 
New York, and especially under the Napoleonic 
regime. It was always understood and believed, al- 
though the matter cannot now be settled by what is 
termed positive proof, that either after the disasters 
preceding Elba, or those preceding St. Helena, Jumel 
had a ship, manned and equipped, ready to take Bona- 
parte to America, where, it is kno^\Ti, he very much 
wished to come, at least after Waterloo. 

In 1814 the Khedive of Egypt sent as a gift to 
Napoleon several hundred African cj'press trees, 
young little trees, each with its roots wrapped up in a 
little bag filled with native earth. Napoleon's en- 
forced trip to Elba kept him from doing a great many 
things, including the planting of these trees, and the 
Jumels, finding them thrown aside, neglected, in the 
garden of the Tuileries, saw the opportunity to do a 
pretty thing. They could not take Napoleon to 
America; but they could take those trees, and save 
them from dying; and they did! And they planted 
them in their grounds, around a fish pond which was 
part of the estate of their mansion, at what is now the 
corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and 159th Street ; and 
many of them lived there, for almost a full century. 
I remember seeing some twenty of them still standing 
as recently as about 1910. 

The Jumel Mansion has been bought by the city to 
be preserved as a public possession and museum, and 

276 



TO JUMEL AND VAN CORTLANDT 

contains much old-time furniture. The house is 
roofed with shingles of great size; it has charming 
doorways ; it has a broad hall and admirable rooms ; 
catalpa and box bushes grow round about, the box 
having been procured from the box garden of Mt. 
Vernon. 

The history and associations of this house, and the 
personality of the Jumels, make altogether a bizarre 
and colorful picture in the history of New York. And 
most bizarre of all the associations was the second 
marriage of Madame Jumel. For here, the year after 
Jumel's death, she was married to Aaron Burr. She 
had engaged Burr to attend to some law business, and 
he made court to her with the ardor of youth, almost 
eighty years old though he was, and she a woman of 
approaching sixty. 

She refused his suit, but, not willing to take such a 
rebuff. Burr one day appeared at the house and told 
her that he was there to marry her. He had with him 
the very minister who had officiated at his first mar- 
riage, fifty-one years before! The very boldness of 
it succeeded, and she permitted the marriage to pro- 
ceed. But the married life of the curious couple was 
short, and was ended by a separation and then a 
divorce, and Mrs. Burr continued to be known as 
Madame Jumel. And as Burr shortly thereafter died, 
the incident was thus doubly closed. 

Madame Jumel lived till about the age of ninety, 
not dying until 1865. Her life spanned American his- 
tory from Lexington to Appomattox. 

An old New Yorker tells me how she used to look in 

277 



THE BOOK OF XEW YOKK 

her later years. She was still the grande dame, and 
he remombors seeing her driving, daily, in a high- 
swung calash; she impressed him — he was a yomig 
man then — as overdressed but impressive ; she usually 
wore canary-colored satin, and rouged her cheeks. 
They had never met, yet. passing each other daily, she 
seemed to recognize in him a young friend, and he 
liked to receive her friendly, stately bow. 

Fitz-Greene Halleck used to visit here, and it has 
always been understood that it was while he was a 
Jumel guest, in this house associated with the great- 
est men of our E evolution, where he could hear 
talk of Xapoleon and his marshals that came from 
personal acquaintance with them, that, thus inspired, 
he WTote his right brave fighting lines : 

''Strike — till the last armed foe expires; 
Strike — for your altars and your fires ; 
Strike — for the gi'eeu graves of your sires; 
God, and your native land!" 

Far to the northward of the Jumel Mansion, on the 
farther side of the Harlem, close to the northern edge 
of Greater New York and the line of Yonkers, in the 
midst of one of the city's greatest parks. Van Cort- 
landt, still stands a delightful pre-E evolutionary 
home, the Van Cortlandt Mansion. It is set in the 
midst of a level plain, hemmed in by low-rising slopes. 
It was built in 174S. It is spacious, dignified, and al- 
together sweet and charming in its setting in the midst 
of sweeping greenery. 

In its interior it is of fetching interest to those who 

278 



TO JUMEL x\ND VAN CORTLANDT 

love the old, with its fireplaces, its paneling, its wain- 
scoting. It is kept up as a public museum to set forth 
the furniture and fittings of the past, and particu- 
larly of note are the fascinating chintzes, old wall 
hangings, with their pictures of such scenes as Penn 's 
Treaty; and also of particular interest is the great 
cellar-kitchen, homelike and comfortable. 

But little of definite association or history is con- 
nected with this pleasing memento of the past. A 
wounded British officer died, within these walls, in the 
arms of his fiancee. Washington slept one night here, 
in 1781. He slept here one other night, in 1783, and 
this second time changed a traveling suit of clothes 
for a suit more fitting for New York. Which re- 
minds me of the house in Keswick, in England, where 
a tablet on the wall declares that within that building 
the Prince of Wales once changed his shirt. 




279 



CHAPTEE XXII 



HAMILTON AND BURB 




PLEASANT description has come 
do^\^l to us of pretty Eliza- 
beth Schuyler plajang back- 
gammon mth Benjamin 
Franklin, at her home, the 
home of her father, the great 
Schuyler, in Albany, when she 
""^^ was but a charming young 

girl. *'He was very kind to me,*' she said long after- 
wards. The picture is not that of the usual Franklin, 
a man immersed in affairs, but of a kindly, a sympa- 
thetic Franklin, a very human Franklin. Did his wise 
old eyes, which had seen so much, discern some sug- 
gestion of a sad future in the soft brightness of hers? 
It was not like busy old Benjamin to spend his time 
playing backgammon with a young girl, when his 
country needed all his thought. *'He was very kind 
to me.'' One likes Franklin so much the better for 
these simple words of a girl's appreciation! 

She became the wife of Alexander Hamilton, and a 
future of happiness seemed assured. But her eldest 
son was killed in a duel on the Weehawken bluffs. 
Three years afterwards, her husband was killed in a 

280 



HAMILTON AND BURE 

duel with Burr on the same spot. And then there fol- 
lowed a saddened widowhood of fifty long years. 

The Hamilton and Burr duel still looms vividly 
as the most intimate tragedy of New York. It is as 
if it took place but yesterday. The quarrel, and the 
duel, and the death of Hamilton, are still matters of 
concern. 

That Weehawken dueling ground was a fatal place 
in early New York days. It was a level spot on the 
face of the rocky cliff. There was no access from 
above : except at low tide it could not be approached 
even from below except by small boats. And finally 
it was blasted quite out of existence: although not 
until it had blasted a good many lives. 

Dueling was recognized by most men of Hamilton's 
day. He himself had once acted as a second. And 
so, when he carried on a long campaign of vilification 
against Burr, using *' fighting words," and using all 
of his great influence to keep Burr from the Gov- 
ernorship of New York and from the Presidency of 
the nation, it was not strange that a duel ended it all. 

The comparative character and aims of Hamilton 
and Burr have been so unquestioningly established by 
what is known as history that it would be altogether 
unprofitable to attempt a revision. One was abso- 
lutely good, the other absolutely bad, for history has 
it so. 

Almost all history represents the judgments and 
passions of the time of which it treats. The more 
deeply the historian delves, the more passion and prej- 
udice he unearths. The passion and prejudice may 

281 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

represent the truth, in which case history will repre- 
sent the truth ; but it may be untruth, or it may be a 
mixture. The feeling of their day was intensely for 
Hamilton and as intensely against Burr, and there- 
fore we find the feeling perpetuated. 

Hamilton must have possessed great and admirable 
qualities. He had done great things. He had made 
powerful friends, and had even won the warm friend- 
ship of Washington. He had married into one of the 
great families. He had gained popular admiration. 
And he was killed by his rival, which added the final 
touch of glory to the one and of depravity to the 
other. 

The two men and their rivalry made so vivid an 
impression, not only in New York but in the whole 
country, that their story is as if of only yesterday. 
They were within less than a year of each other in 
age. They were within an inch of each other in 
height, and the height was below the average. They 
were greatly alike in ambition, in personal magnetism, 
in certainty of thought and swiftness of decision. 

For a time after the Revolution, they were friends, 
and dominated the New York bar. One or the other 
was sure of the important cases. Judges feared their 
dominant way, their intellectual superiority. Then 
came political rivalry and jealousy. Hamilton, hon- 
ored and admired though he was, was not much con- 
sidered for high elective office; his triumphs in office 
were in appointive service. Burr, on the other hand, 
had the kind of following that rallies at the polls, 
and he tied Jefferson for the Presidency, and became 

282 



HAMILTON AND BURR 

Vice-President when the election had to be decided by 
the House of Representatives. 

It was in 1804 that the fatal clash came. The home 
of Hamilton was at that time the Grange, as it was 
called, a building still standing, moved indeed from its 
original location, but still in the same general neigh- 
borhood, it now being on Convent Avenue, close 
against a modern brown-stone church. 

It seems curious that Hamilton, a lawyer in active 
practice, should have made his home, in those early 
days, far up there on Washington Heights, miles 
northward from what was then the city, although 
within the limits of Manhattan Island. But it was 
because he was a far-sighted man financially ; because 
he anticipated vast increase in land values; and, 
too, because he personally loved to live in the coun- 
try. 

The appearance of his house has been largely al- 
tered, but it may still be seen what it originally was : 
a square-fronted house, with a huge portico, and 
with a projecting central octagon room. The fine 
cornice lines show the original dentils and triglyphs ; 
there is a fine old doorway, with glass in designs of 
easy-curving circles and semi-circles; and the roof 
and the portico are liberally balustraded. 

It was from this house that Hamilton went forth 
to his death in his duel across the Hudson, and it 
was from this house that Mrs. Hamilton and the 
seven children were hurriedly driven far down to 
82 Jane Street, in Greenwich Village, when the news 
of the duel came, to see him before he died. The 

283 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

house to which he was carried was that of a friend, 
"VMUiam Bayard, and it has now disappeared. 

Burr at that time lived in the great mansion known 
as Eichmond Hill, which stood a little north of St. 
John's Park, where Charlton Street crosses Varick 
or, more strictly, on a knoll in the center of an estate 
within the block now bounded by King, Varick, Charl- 
ton and Macdougal Streets. Though long ago de- 
stroyed, Eichmond Hill is still remembered as a name 
which, more than any other, stands in the popular 
imagination as representative of old New York. 

It was built by a British commissary in 1760 ; it was 
afterwards occupied, in turn, by Lord Amherst and 
Sir "William Carleton; in 1776 it was lived in for a 
short time by Washington; it was the home of John 
Adams when he lived in New York as Vice-President ; 
and afterward it became the home of Aaron Burr. 

On what is now Spring Street, just west of Mac- 
dougal, was the gateway through which Burr quietly 
walked on his way to the duel, and through which 
some hours later he returned, outwardly so calm and 
unconcerned that one who knew him well, and talked 
with him in the library of his splendid home, merely 
noticed that he was, as usual, calm and perfectly at 
ease ; and when the friend left and went out into the 
streets, he was amazed to learn that Burr had that 
morning fought a duel and that the city was aflame 
with excitement over Hamilton 's impending death. 

Down in Old Trinity churchyard is a simple monu- 
ment, rising pyramidally from a base with curved 
corners; it was long ago erected by the corporation 

284 



HAMILTON AND BUEB 

of the church in honor of Hamilton, who is buried 
beneath it. The very unostentation of this memento 
mori would give no indication of the tremendous im- 
pression which his death in reality made. The entire 
city mourned. Guns boomed from the vessels in the 
harbor, both French and American, while his funeral 
was in progress. It is still told that his sword and 
his hat lay on his coffin, and that in front of this was 
led, by two black servants, his favorite gray horse, 
with spurred boots swinging reversed ; the black men 
being dressed in white, with white turbans bound in 
crape. And more than any other citizen of the city, 
Alexander Hamilton still fills the eye of New York. 

Burr, the rival, was a man of singular personal 
charm. There was probably, one may presume, 
something untrustworthy in him, to explain how he 
could gain the deep distrust of such men as Washing- 
ton, Jefferson and Hamilton; and yet, the friends of 
Burr declared that the other two men were mainly 
moved in their judgment by Hamilton's bitter ani- 
mosity to Burr and by their confidence in the judg- 
ment of Hamilton. 

In private life, the characteristic for which Burr is 
most held in opprobrium, his relations with women, 
was a characteristic of Hamilton also, although he 
has escaped the odium ; an advantage that came from 
his being a popular idol. 

Whatever of the sinister or the unscrupulous there 
may have been in Burr's methods and aims, and 
there seems to have been much, he was a man of pro- 
found mind, of deep sagacity, of infinite daring, of 

285 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

sweeping ambition. When he saw that the duel had 
closed forever his hopes of further power within the 
United States, he pictured a mighty empire to rise be- 
yond the Appalachians, with himself as its head. His 
plan would have taken the Mississippi Valley from 
the United States, and had he been a loyal American 
he could not, therefore, have considered it; but the 
temptation was immense, and he felt embittered be- 
cause the United States had so turned against 
him. 

One of the most romantic episodes in American 
history was that of Burr's projected empire. He 
was stirred by the example of Napoleon, then in the 
sweep of power. As Napoleon had carved for him- 
self an empire in Europe, he would do the same in 
America. Burr would be another Napoleon. And he 
was not only a lawyer and statesman but had been 
an excellent soldier. 

The country beyond the A^Dpalachians had from 
the first exerted a charm on brave and romantic 
minds. Sir Walter Scott has said that the adherents 
of the "Young Pretender" planned a kingdom for 
him on the other side of these mountains after the 
failure of 1745 ; and what a romantic effort it would 
have been! Jefferson and Burr, most romantic- 
minded of American statesmen, were alike in seeing 
the possibilities of the great West; but the broad 
patriotism of Jefferson brought to achievement the 
Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clarke Expe- 
dition, whereas Burr expected to develop the West 
for himself or not at all. With the Mississippi Val- 

286 



HAMILTON AND BURE 

ley lie would have united Mexico, then ready for a 
strong and astute ruler to assume control. 

The whole episode of Blennerhasset Island, and 
Burr's winning of the profound allegiance of the 
learned Blennerhasset and his attractive wife, who 
had made a bookish paradise in the distant wilder- 
ness, is among the real things of history that are full 
of what seems impossible romance. How little any 
one could have suspected, in those days of splendid 
dreams, that Mrs. Blennerhasset was to die, in 
wretched poverty, in New York City, cared for in 
her last moments by a Sister of Charity who learned 
of her plight, and that Burr himself, with all his am- 
bitions at length crushed, was to creep about New 
York in the shadow of straitened means and scorn ! 

Men and munitions were gathered there on the 
Ohio River island for the beginnmg of the attempt, 
and the flotilla started down the stream; and in the 
bravery of it all, the wonderful picturesqueness, the 
gay insouciance, one almost forgets that in the pro- 
jected seizing of New Orleans, and making it the 
capital of the Mississippi-Mexico Empire, Burr was 
acting treasonably. 

But it all failed, failed absolutely, and although the 
trial of Burr for treason also failed, the man himself 
had won only an added degree of distrust and dislike. 

He went to England ; and there for a time one sees 
him in his most attractive aspect, meeting the literary 
and the artistic and walking and talking with rigid 
Jeremy Bentham, for that man of unclarity of ex- 
pression found delight in the absolute clarity of Burr. 

287 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

And now Burr learned that England feared him I 
Jefferson, his great enemy, who had carried on the 
bitterness of Hamilton, was now President, and let 
it be quietly intimated to England that she was har- 
boring a man with Napoleon-like ambitions; where- 
upon Burr was asked to leave the country. 

Very well, he would go to France. ''But no!" 
Then to Ireland. * ' No, a thousand times no ! " Then, 
asked England, suavely — how her mind even then 
ran to putting opposition leaders on rocky islands ! — 
** Won't you go to Helgoland? It is a pleasant little 
island with fine sea breezes?" 

At which Burr laughed, and, not caring for a rocky 
island, accepted instead the invitation of the Swedish 
Minister to visit Sweden, whence he went to Paris, 
and there again he busied himself with meeting the 
literary and the artistic as if politics and ambition 
had never disturbed his mind. 

He was watched closely by the secret police of 
Napoleon, who were quite puzzled by him. By the 
great Corsican himself America was always taken 
very seriously, and he must have wondered just what 
Burr was planning to do, and meanwhile was frankly 
puzzled by the presence of this handsome and urbane 
American. 

After a while. Burr quietly went back to New York 
again and again took up the practice of law, but he 
did not now make much of a success of it, as great 
clients stood aloof, for the public mind was so set 
against him that although, in the past, courts had 
scarcely dared decide against him, it was now the case 

288 



HAMILTON AND BURR 

that courts scarcely dared decide in his favor. He 
went quietly about the city in an atmosphere of aver- 
sion. Toward the end of his long life he married 
Madame Jumel, but was quickly unmarried, and soon 
thereafter went to his grave. 






i 









289 



CHAPTEE xxrn 



"WHERE MAXT THOrSA^TDS DVTELL 




AXY thonsands still 
dwell on Manhattan Is- 
land, in spite of the 
spread of business sec- 
tions and the inunense 
increase in growth of 
suburban population ; 
in fact, Manhattan is 
still the dwelling place 
"-— - not only of thousands 

but of many hundreds of thousands: but other hun- 
dreds of thousands prefer to live in the other boroughs 
or in the surrounding towns near by, and to come in, 
they and their families, for business and for a great 
part of their pleasure. Those who do not live within 
the limits of Manhattan are rather disrespectfully re- 
ferred to as ''sleeping outside of the city," by the true 
Manhattanite, who will not even admit Brooklyn 
to the fold, although in the late nineties Brooklyn 
became officially part of Greater New York as the 
Borough of Brooklyn. It had long been the third 
city in the Union, in size, but was quietly absorbed, 

290 



WHERE MANY THOUSANDS DWELL 

and has since increased hugelv in size ; snbways and 
new bridges have opened all of it to easy access, and 
its once marked characteristic of miles and miles of 
individual homes is swiftly changing to miles and 
miles of apartment houses, and whole areas of tene- 
ments, filled with foreigners, are in the quiet old 
streets of the part long called Williamshurgh. 

Plymouth Church, a great barnlike structure on 
Orange Street, is by far the most famous building of 
Brooklyn, for it was for forty years the church of the 
most eloquent pulpit orator that America has pro- 
duced. And it should not be forgotten that Beecher 
won his way superbly in England and was there a 
splendid force for America in the dark days of our 
Civil War. 

And of what strange characteristics was he com- 
pounded—this orator-preacher who liked to have in 
front of him at dinner a dish full of uncut gems, 
for the sensuous pleasure of running his fingers 
through them, and feeling them, and watching them 
sparkle and glow! But he was more than a great 
preacher and a great public man; he was also a man 
of vast kindliness, never too occupied or too weary to 
help any one who needed help. 

Prospect Park is something else of which Brook- 
lyn is justly proud, for it is so big and so attractive, 
and it includes what is still known as Battle Pass, 
which was a critical point in the Battle of Long Is- 
land, and its principal entrance is through a striking 
memorial archway set up in honor of the men of the 
Civil War. Brooklyn has also an important and 

291 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

growing museum, and it lias Greenwood Cemetery, to 
which every visitor to Xew York from other parts of 
the country was expected to pilgrimage in the good 
old days. 

And BrookhTi has a great Xavj' Yard, and here, 
beside it, in "Wallabout Bay, were moored the dread- 
ful prison-ships, the Jersey and others, in Revo- 
lutionary days : and in Fort Greene Park are buried 
most of the men who died in those ships, their bodies 
having been long ago gathered by the Tammany 
Society, which buried them here with honor. I think 
the general impression in regard to these prison-ship 
mart^TS — really martyrs^ for most of them died 
through cruelty and not from the necessities of war 
conditions — is that there were but a few men in all, 
but in reality the bones of fully eleven thousand of 
them rest here. The horror of those English hulks 
made an indelible impression upon the people of all 
the Thirteen Colonies, and traditions of the harrow- 
ing inhumanity exist to this day. And of these men 
Whitman, with noble appreciation, wrote: 

' ' Greater than memory of AcMUes or Ulysses 

]\Iore, more by far to thee than tomb of Alexander, 

Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of 

mouldy bones, 
Once living men — once resolute courage, aspiration, strength, 
The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America." 

Two miles or so due east from here, still within the 
city but in the Borough of Queens, is Jamaica, where, 
in King Park, is preserved a square-fronted house 

292 



WHERE MANY THOUSANDS DWELL 

with a gambrel roof, which was the country home of 
Rufus King, who was one of the first two United 
States Senators from New York, and Minister to 
England under three Presidents. 

Some miles to the northeast of Jamaica is ancient 
Flushing, also within the present limits of the city. 
It was settled by the Dutch, and given the name of 
Vlissingen, in honor of the old port in Holland, Vlis- 
singen, or Flushing. 

Here there still stands a very ancient house, al- 
though not quite so ancient as the settlement, and it 
was built by an English Quaker named John Bowne. 
It is in all probability the yerj oldest building in or 
near New York. It was built in 1661 : which was so 
long ago that the news of the Stuart Restoration had 
scarcely reached this country ! The Dutch ruled New 
York then, but shortly thereafter the English seized 
the colony. Fox, the great Quaker leader, was a 
guest in this house when on a visit to America. 

It is a smallish house, dormer-windowed, a house 
of atmosphere, and in some curious way manages to 
give an effect of quaint Quakerism. And it vividly, 
by its very existence, its very presence here, is re- 
mindful of the far distant Dutch rule. 

The entire Long Island portion of Greater New 
York, both the Borough of Queens and that of Brook- 
lyn, is a vast district of homes: and not only is it 
where so many hundreds of thousands sleep, but it is 
where many, even from Manhattan, sleep their final 
sleep, for Long Island has been given many a ceme- 
tery. BrookljTi has, in particular. Greenwood, and 

293 



THE BO-OK OF NE^' YOEK 
ibrr? ?j?? ^rre^: area^ oi (^inx^ierie^ oi all kind? aad 

CTsesiiiv bsTin^ Tvo or Tii^^e funeral? a» one time oa 

!<«:. - -^ ^., ... ._..: -. , .. _ — r xT>?a 

Enrnmoc? nnznbei?^ of Xev Yoxkexs m^vke iheir 
:^^cv JrT^rT. or ••Jer5=ey" ^ ^ " 

tb? -jsaure n^is n^eaniniT. ic»r in e^SLrlv Ccl ys 

If lie fsK of b^ini: ii- ^ r?- 

- - ? >v c^ Tori CiTv, 

- r - - ~ r . "orn s" rxeci sn^l 

^v^st :^ knr'cm ss ine Bronx, ti^e grr^at s^^'exed ter- 

:i:f H V Pdrer, TKiii its h=l: nn!- 






seii-^^r lisere, Bron^ vh.? i? on reeozd a? 



~_£^f ^' '~"~ ^•e preseni Bronx, 'wss on^? ^ezi^nsly 






WHERE MANY THOUSANDS DWELL 

and, as imagined by Irving, took to Ms bed from 
grief when be learned that streets were to be ciit 
throtigh his property, but aro*/^ Joyously idien Ms 
lawyer explained that it meant fortune and not ruin- 
Well, streets have ?>een cut through the Bronx, streets 
infinite in number: and Irving was clearly a real- 
estate prophet, thongh without sufficieiit confidcaice in 
hLs oviTi insight to get real estate 5»rofit out of it 

Far over in the eastern part of the Bronx Ls Hntdi- 
inson Biver, reminder of the fact that th^ X'^'^^s^c'it^ 
Anne Hutchinson, driven from New England with her 
children, made her home near this bit of water, and 
that the cabin was burned by the Lidians and she and 
her children were slain: and it is not pleasant to 
know that the stem Boston clergy— it was at the time 
of the beginning of the CromweU wars — offered up 
thanks becau-se *'God had made a heavy example of a 
woful woman." 

Within the present Pelham Bay Park, Colonel 
Glover, with only seven or eight hundred men, halted 
a force of some four thousand imder Lord Howe, for 
a long enough time to x^rmit Washington to make a 
move towards White Plains : and in 1814 two British 
gunboats bombarded American batteries located in 
what is now this park — this being the last time that 
BritLsh guns were hostilely heard in New York. 

In Eastchester stiU stands a charmingly attractive 
old church, that of St. Paul^s, built in 1765, and stiil 
looking out over the ancient churchyard, with its flock 
of old white stones, which date back many years be- 
fore this to the time of a still earlier St. Paul's. It 

295 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

is a romantic-looking church of field stone, a high- 
shouldered church, with a square tower set in front, 
topped with a little white belfry; the kind of old- 
fashioned church and churchyard that makes you 
think of the curfew which tolls the knell of parting 
day and of lowing herds winding slowly o'er the lea, 
in spite of the fact that this charming reminder of the 
past is now threatened with eclipse through changing 
surroundings. 

The Bronx also has great Botanical Gardens and a 
Zoological Garden, which are largely under the city's 
control ; and it is believed that nowhere are wild ani- 
mals exhibited in such a striking and extensive en- 
vironment of trees and rocks and water. 

So immense is the area of the city that the suburbs 
do not begin until one is miles away from the city's 
center. Except for Jersey City and Hoboken, which 
are independent cities rather than places of suburban 
living, the suburbs of New York do not begin within 
less than a dozen miles or so; whereas with other 
cities with important suburbs, such as Boston and 
Philadelphia, the suburbs mainly end within a dozen 
miles. New York, beginning its suburbs at the dozen 
miles, claims suburbanites and conunuters from far- 
flung towns that are forty or even fifty miles 
away. 

To the eye of the trained New Yorker, one who has 
opportunity to know all types and who has habituated 
himself to look closely at them, there are certain 
marks of differentiation. The Westchester family 
can usually be picked from the family of New Jersey, 

296 



WHERE MANY THOUSANDS DWELL 

and the New Jersey family from that of suburban 
Long Island; and the Brooklyn family is in a class 

by itself. 

New Rochelle, up the Sound a little beyond Pelham 
Bay Park, touches the imagination because of its 
having been settled, in the long ago, by Huguenots 
who fled from religious persecution in France after 
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The visitor 
finds few reminders of those early times, but the blood 
of those long-ago Huguenots is a prized strain in 
some of the leading New York families. 

New Rochelle represents religious persecution ; but 
it also is remindful of something very like irreligious 
persecution, for the brilliant Thomas Paine, he of the 
' ' times that tried men 's souls, ' ' was given by Congress 
a confiscated estate of three hundred acres at the edge 
of the village of New Rochelle for his services in 
the course of the Revolution, and he lived there for a 
time, but did not find the place entirely congenial as 
a home, his beliefs making him persona non grata to 
the leading people ; whereupon he went to New York, 
and thence to its Greenwich Village, and it was there 
in Greenwich that he died. 

His last request was that he be buried by the Quak- 
ers, his father having been one of that sect, but on 
account of his infidel opinions the Quakers refused 
the request. His poor funeral on the long, lonely 
journey from Greenwich Village to his New Rochelle 
farm, has been described, with brief eloquence, by 
Ingersoll: "In the carriage, a woman and her son 
who had lived on the bounty of the dead— on horse- 

297 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

back a Quaker the humanity of whose heart domi- 
nated the creed of his head — and following on foot, 
two negroes, filled with gratitude. ' ' 

Strange as was Paine 's career in America, in Eng- 
land, in France — in France he was elected a deputy 
to the National Convention, and when Louis the Six- 
teenth was tried urged that his life be spared and 
that he be sent to America — the most striking event 
of his extraordinary career was, to use a Hibernian- 
ism, something he did not do, for he was chosen, by 
Napoleon, to arrange and introduce a popular form of 
government for Great Britain after he. Napoleon, 
should have conquered the island! 

After he had been buried on his farm in New Eo- 
chelle for some years, his friend, the English agitator, 
"William Cobbett, decided to remove his bones to 
England; and he actually got them over there, in a 
bag ; that they were ' ' in a bag" has been remembered ; 
but he seems to have mislaid the bag of bones some- 
where, perhaps forgot it in hurrying out from some 
inn to catch a stage, in which case one may imagine 
the disappointment of the waiter who examined it. 
And thus vanished "Tom" Paine. 

Paine 's home in New Kochelle is still standing, and 
maintained as a museum: a pleasant cottage stand- 
ing in a hollow beside the present level of the road ; 
an attractive-looking old house, shingle-sided, green- 
shuttered, with a pleasant garden beside it with old- 
fashioned flowers. 

A romantic memory of New Rochelle is that the 

298 



WHEEE MANY THOUSANDS DWELL 

Huguenots, before they had built a church for them- 
selves there, used to walk to New York, on Com- 
munion Sundays, to worship at a church of their 
faith; and they sang together old French hymns and 
chorals, as they walked the long and weary way; and 
it is a picture that remains with one and shows what 
manner of men the early settlers of the Empire State 
were. The road has little to remind one, now, of that 
early day; but still, in fancy, one hears those French 
voices. It is romance at our very doors. 

The church in New York to which they used to walk 
was that of St. Esprit; it was built in 1688, in Petti- 
coat Lane, now Marketfield Street, beside the Produce 
Exchange. Afterwards the congregation worshiped 
for one hundred and thirty years on Pine Street, and 
are now located at 45 East 27th Street ; and the service 
is still held in the French tongue, just as the Huguenot 
service survives in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral 
in England. 

The commuters of to-day would not care to walk 
to New York from New Eochelle, or from any of 
the myriad other suburban towns from which they 
come in, six mornings of the week, filling every seat 
of innumerable trains. And suburban living has im- 
mensely increased through the influence of the motor- 
car, which has added such unexpected pleasures and 
possibilities to home life away from the city. 

Of course, the kind of suburban living that ties 
down the father to a life divided between office hours 
and travel hours has its disadvantages : one of them 

299 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

being the slight acquaintance that can come between 
himself and his family : and it is not entirely humor 
which makes the basis of this story told me as true, 
about a small boy over in New Jersey, who was being 
most carefully and particularly brought up by his 
devoted parents. He had reached the age of six with- 
out such an unhygienic thing as a pet when the ice- 
man, who was sorry for him, brought him a pup, a 
genuine one with a short tail, a real bark and great 
devotion. The small boy loved the pup at sight and 
his parents had to yield and let him keep it. It was 
named Paddy in honor of the iceman and came to be 
the object of the boy's devoted love. 

One day when the boy was away, the dog was run 
over by an automobile and killed. The mother, think- 
ing there would be great grief and distress when her 
small son learned of it, waited until the boy had had 
his supper and then said : ' ' My son, I have news that 
will grieve you. This afternoon your Paddy was 
killed by an automobile." 

The boy looked at his plate and then at his mother 
and said: *'I am very sorry." Then, quietly after 
a pause : ' ' May I go out and tell the boys ? ' ' 

He was gone half an hour and came back and went 
quietly upstairs with his nurse to go to bed. Sud- 
denly there were wild cries and wails from the bed- 
room, loud and many of them, and his mother went 
upstairs two steps at a time. 

'' Mother, mother, Paddy is dead!" he cried. 

* ' Yes, my son, but why are you so excited now? He 
^ 300 



WHERE MANY THOUSANDS DWELL 

is no more dead than when I told you about it an 

hour ago." " 

'*Yes, I know you told me—" sobbed the boy— but 
I did not understand— I thought you said Daddy was 
dead." 










X*'*^^"-^ 

^^.\^. 



^\^ -^i^^^^ 



301 



CHAPTER XXIV 



rP THE HrDSOX 




-i^rrf^ 



HE viewpoint of the Duteli of 
New Amsterdam of tiiree limi- 
dred years ago was always dis- 
tinctly their own. For exam- 
ple, when they made the pali- 
saded wall which in time grave 
name to "Wall Street, it was 
not as a precaution against In- 
dians, but to provide a defense 
against the probable advance 
of Xew Englanders, who were 
expected to come sweeping down from Massachusetts 
and Connecticut. When they named the Hudson the 
Xorth River, thus geographically puzzling the gen- 
erations, it was not because of any relation of the 
river to Xew York, but because it was the principal 
stream along the northern part of the Dutch posses- 
sions, just as the Delaware, the South River as they 
called it. was the principal stream in the other direc- 
tion. 

The Xorth River was slow in coming to prominence, 
except as a waterway to Albany. Verazzano must 
have sailed up far enough to see the Palisades, be- 

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UP THE HUDSON 

cause, in his description, he tells of the "steep hills" 
from amid which there ran do^-n to the sea "an ex- 
ceeding great stream of water." But there was no 
farming countr>^ along the river's banks; there were 
just the swampy "Jersey Meadows," behind the PaU- 
sades, and then nules and nnles of wonderful scenery. 
The ice remained longer in the Xorth Ptiver than in 
the East, because the East Piver is mainly salt water 
and the Xorth mainly fresh; in addition, Manhattan 
Island, on the side toward the Hudson, had much^ of 
swamp and sluggish water and hills, and was a region 
not to be compared, for practical development, with 
that on the eastern side of the island, therefore busi- 
ness and residences sought, for a long time, the east- 
ward side. 

But at length the Xorth Piver won supremacy. It 
won the most important ferries. It won the great 
ocean steamers. The total mileage of docks of the en- 
tire harbor of Xew York is more than double that of 
London, and more than four times that of Liverpool. 
In one particular, that of ferries, there are fewer 
boats in the Xew York waters than there were, for the 
great under-river tunnels are more and more taking 
their place; but the ferries are more than replaced by 
an increase in other ships. The ferries were a fea- 
ture in Xew York life that mightily struck the fancy 
of Walt Whitman ; they afforded him, as he expressed 
it, "inimitable, streaming, never-failing living 

poems." 

As you go up the great Hudson, you pass, on the 
right, old Greenwich and Chelsea, and on the left the 

303 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

heights of Woehawken, where used to be the dueling 
ledge. 

The long stretch of Riverside Park is passed, with 
Grant's Tomb looming lofty and grand; and on the 
left one sees the Palisades, basalt cliffs rising 
abruptlv for miles from the river 's edge ; and in the 
distance looms Indian Head, misty and mysterious 
and pictorial. 

There is constantly increasmg beauty and in a few 
miles Yonkers is reached: and it is a place of fasci- 
nating memories, for here, as a girl and as a young 
woman, Kved that Mary Philipse whom "Washington 
loved and whom he wished to marry. He was then 
only twenty-four, but was staider and steadier than 
his years by reason of his early meeting important 
responsibilities, and Mary Philipse on her part, then 
twenty-six, was probably younger than her years, for 
she was rich, lived in a beautiful home, was univer- 
sally admired, and had a host of friends. 

The old Philipse Manor Hall still stands, in Yon- 
kers. in the heart of a business district which in noth- 
ing else displays any romantic tendency; but a 
portrait of Mary Philipse herself shows her as an 
exceedingly wholesome young woman, dressed decol- 
lete, with eyes which seem demurely alight with fun. 
The rose on the bodice, the sloping shoulders, the 
short curls piquantly in front of the ears, the little 
flat lace cap with bow tied prunly beneath the chin, the 
long nose, the high-arched brows, the candor of ex- 
pression, all these assist in showing why the suscep- 
tible George liked her. And another reason for lik- 

304 



UP THE HUDSON 

ing her was that she was the daughter of a very great 
family and at the same tune wealthy in her own right. 
The old Manor Hall was built in 1682 by artisans 
imported from England for the finest work, and was 
enlarged in the following centurv^ The greater part 
of its splendid gardens and hedges, which ran do\\Ti 
to the Hudson, which was then in full view, long since 
disappeared, but even yet there is a general air^ of 
charm and spaciousness, and the house is interesting 
even in the midst of uninteresting surroundings, 
standing as it does with towering old horse-chestnuts 
beside it, with green grass round about, with thriving 
old box bushes at the southern doorway, and with a 
hedge of privet. The shutters of solid wood, the 
balustraded hip-roof, the dormer windows, the 
pillared and dentiled little porticoes, the broad door 
opening in Dutch fashion in two halves (for the 
original Philipse of over a century before the Keyo- 
lution was himself a Dutchman), instantly rouse in- 
terest. 

The great fireplaces still remain. There is wealth 
of ancient paneling and cornices, and the main stair- 
case is notable among American staircases, with its 
great twirl around the newel post and its twirled 
baluster and banister-rail with a charming ramp. 
There are delightfully suggestive window seats ; and 
always one thinks of Washington and Mary Philipse. 

It was a place of splendid hospitality. In the 
garret were quarters for fifty servants. Distin- 
guished visitors and travelers, who arrived in New 
York, were, as a matter of course, asked to visit here 

305 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

at Yonkers. And so it naturally happened that 
Washington was invited, as he was a distinguished 
young Virginian and officer; and in addition, he was 
a close friend of Beverly Robinson, also a Virginian, 
who had married Mary Philipse's sister. 

It is one of the most curious facts in regard to New 
York City, that not only was George Washington con- 
nected with many of the most important happenings 
in its history, but almost every old building, that has 
been preserved in or near the city, had some interest- 
ing connection with his career. 

It was in 1756 that Washington was at Yonkers. 
He was then in the military service, and was on his 
way to Boston to confer with Governor Shirley in re- 
gard to some military matters and also to describe to 
Shirley the circumstances of the death of his son at 
Braddock's defeat — a trip which gave Washington in- 
valuable information in regard to Boston, where he 
was to be in command, and besieging the British, 
twenty years later. 

For that early trip to Boston Washington had 
equipped himself with even more than usual mag- 
nificence; with gold lace, with silk stockings and 
ruffled shirts, with blue velvet and broadcloth ; and he 
was accompanied on the trip by two white servants, 
each dressed in complete livery, with much of scarlet, 
and each wearing a silver-laced hat. And it is inter- 
esting to know that Washington's horse was elabor- 
ately outfitted with the Washington crest on the 
housings. For his own use the young officer, a gay 
cavalier indeed, also had with him three gold-and- 

306 



UP THE HUDSON 

scarlet sword-knots, three silver-and-blue sword- 
knots and a gold-laced hat. 

And somehow, when one thinks of his seemingly 
ceaseless sartorial solicitude, there come to mind the 
lines of the irreverent versifier who wrote : 

* ' George Washington worked hard, they say, 
And went unshaved on many a weary tramp, 
And very seldom looked the way 
He does upon a postage stamp. ' ' 

Washington stayed in New York and Yonkers from 
February 18 to 25, and for much of that time, in both 
places, was in the company of members of the 
Philipse family. His diary mentions his expenses on 
the trip, and several items are for the entertaining of 
*' ladies" in New York; among other things, he took 
the ladies, one of whom was Mary Philipse, to a play 
called "The Microcosm." He also notes the spend- 
ing of considerable sums for new clothes — he being 
neither the first man nor the last to spend money on 
ladies and new clothes in New York ! 

There can be no positive proof that Washington 
wished to marry Mary Philipse. He was a gentle- 
man, and not even in his diary, to which he confided 
so much, did he set down that he had proposed to 
Mary Philipse and had been refused; neither did 
Mary Philipse, who was a lady, make it public that 
Washington had asked her to be his wife; but that 
all this was really the case, is as certain as anything 
very well can be, and is very much more certain than 
the greater part of what generally passes for history. 

307 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

"Washington called again on the PhUipse familv on 
his retam, through Xew York, southward, and when 
he reluctantlv left he asked a friend to keep him 
advised as to what might happen, and after a while 
this friend, who was Joseph Chew of Xew London, 
Connecticut, a frequent visitor to Xew York and a 
fellow guest vrith. Washington at Beverly Eobinson's, 
wrote several letters to Washington in one of which 
he gave the information that "Colonel Eoger Morris 
was pressing his suit," which tailor-like warning was 
followed by strong advice to take action. With the 
free and easy capitalization of the time, he wrote : 

"How can you be Excused to Continue so long at 
Philadelphia ? I think I should have made a kind of 
Flying march of it if it had been only to have seen 
whether the Works were sufficient to withstand a 
Vigorous Attack — you, a Soldier and a Lover. I 
will not be wanting to let Miss Polly" (by which 
name he usually referred to Mary Philipse) "know 
the SLQcere Eegard a Friend of mine has for her and 
I am sure if she had my Eyes to see thro, she would 
Prefer him to all others." 

The descendants of Mary Philipse in England long 
retaiued, and believed, the story that Washington, 
on receipt of this letter, hurried to Xew York, and, 
arriving there on a winter's evening, sought and ob- 
tained an inter\-iew with Mary Philipse at once, but 
only to find that she was already the promised wife 
of his rival, Roger Morris. 

Roger Morris had been a fellow soldier with 
Washington in the Braddock campaign, and after his 

308 



UP THE HUDSON 

marriage served under Wolfe at the capture of 
Quebec. He and his wife together planned and built 
the house on Manhattan Island which is usually 
referred to as the Jumel Mansion. Close to beautiful 
Lake Mahopac, which lay within the tract of forty 
thousand acres that Mary Philip se owned in her own 
right, they made a little summer lodge, whose foun- 
dations may still be seen, overgrown by a tangle of 

vines. 

To the entire Philipse connection the Eevolution 
brought disaster. Their property was confiscated, 
and they fled to England under penalty of death 
should they return. The grim proclamation may still 
be read, specifying not only the men of the Philipse 
family, with Beverly Eobinson and Roger Morris, 
but, also by name, Susannah Ptobinson and Mary 
Morris, the two sisters of Frederick Philipse, Lord 
of the Manor, for the two sisters were each of them 
immense holders of real estate in their owm right; 
the unfamiliar-seeming "Mary Morris" being, of 
course, she who had been Mary Philipse. 

In the solemn quiet of the ancient cathedral of 
Chester, in Wales, there was called to my attention, 
as an American, a forgotten tablet set into one of the 
great pillars, a tablet which, with measured and 
lengthy phrasing, tells that it was placed there in 
memory of Frederick Philipse. It sets forth his 
domestic and religious virtues, his devotion to his 
King, his great losses for loyalty, his fleeing for life 
from his confiscated estates ; but I noticed also that 
in the record of self-sacrifice it could only mention 

309 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK 

that he had fled, not that he had fought, and that it 
did not refer to the fact that the Englisli government 
paid him, when an exile in England, the, at that time, 
enormous sum of sixty thousand pounds as at least a 
partial recompense for his losses. 

Eoger Morris, a banished man, though frankly 
opposed to the war, died while the man whom he had 
rivaled was President. And Mary Philipse herself, 
his widow, died in 1825, at the great age of ninety- 
five; and both husband and wife are buried in old 
York of England instead of in the New York of their 
early lives. 

In 1776, before the confiscation and while there was 
danger of the horses and cattle of the Philipse estate 
being seized by American soldiers, "Washington wrote 
to the wife of Mary's brother, Frederick Philipse, 
the Lord of the Manor, he being absent and Mrs. 
Philipse being in charge of the estate, assuring her 
that every possible consideration would be sho^vn, 
and adding briefly, as a postscript, ''I beg the favor 
of having my compliments presented to Mrs. Morris." 

On the walls of the ancient house is a collection of 
portraits of distinguished Americans ; they are paint- 
ings by Sullj' and Rembrandt Peale and Copley, and 
others, including even Gilbert Stuart; a few are 
copies and the others are originals; there are por- 
traits of such men as Laurence and Lee, Jefferson 
and Monroe, General Gates and General Knox, and 
there is even what claims to be a portrait of Benjamin 
Franklin by Benjamin West: in all, a fascinating 
galaxy. 

310 



UP THE HUDSON 

Beyond Yonkers, at Dobbs' Ferry, is what is left 
of the old Livingston mansion ; near here the French 
soldiers under Rochambeau joined the American 
forces; here the papers were signed by Washington 
and Sir Guy Carleton for the evacuation of New 
York; opposite this point, on May 8, 1783, a British 
sloop of war fired the first salute given by Great 
Britain in recognition of the government of America. 

A little beyond Dobbs' Ferry the Hudson opens out 
into the superb Tappan Zee with its width of three 
miles ; and on the right, at the beginning of the Zee, 
is Irvington, where still stands Sunnyside, the de- 
lightful house so kept in loving memory as the home 
most associated with Washington Irving. 

It was built after the Eevolution on the site of a 
preceding house which had been burned by the 
British ; it was a little farmhouse when Irving bought 
it, and he named it Wolfert's Roost, and described it 
in one of his stories. He gradually rebuilt and en- 
larged the place to its present dimensions. It is 
freely ornamented with corbels on the gables, remind- 
ful of the Dutch, and has a sort of Spanish tower at 
one side, reminiscent of his residence in Spain as 
United States Minister. 

The house stands on a level spot just a little above 
the river ; it is a sort of day dream of peacefulness, 
a stone house, low-set, rambling, many-gabled, ivy- 
clad. Nothing is more certain than that houses often 
express the character of their owners, and this house 
is to this day expressive of its romantic, traveled, 
imaginative, fireside-loving owner. 

311 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Irving 's o^vn description of it before he made the 
alterations was as a "little old-fashioned stone man- 
sion, all made up of gable ends, and as full of angles 
and corners as an old cocked hat"; and this word 
'^ little," used more as a term of endearment than as 
literally descriptive, although it might have fairly 
described the house before he began his enlarge- 
ments, certainly does not well describe the house at 
the present time, except by contrast with the huge 
erections, its neighbors, the homes of the rich folk of 
the present day. 

Less than three miles above Irvington, and looking 
out upon the Tappan Zee in its broadest part, is 
Tarryto^vn, beloved of wealthy folk and especially of 
the Rockefellers; a town placed in a setting of ex- 
quisite beauty. 

All of this region, along the Hudson, glimmers 
softly in the twilight of romance, for it is so fascinat- 
ing in itself and in its legends and has been so 
touched with unforgetable beauty by the pen of 
Irving. A magnificent motoring roadway, lined by 
residences, leads on parallel to the river, and is 
never very far from the waterside, along the line 
of the old post-road; and a monument, surmounted 
by the figure of a watching scout, is noticed, and you 
stop and look at its inscription — and you feel a swift 
thrill, and in an instant the present has vanished and 
you are back in the distant past, for this marks the 
spot where Major Andre was stopped by the three 
American scouts. And what a picture vividly comes ! 

312 



UP THE HUDSON 

—the annoyed and gradually very mnch concerned 
major, and the ragged Americans searching this very 
fine gentleman and finding the proofs of his disgrace- 
ful dealings with a traitor. 

And in particular comes the picture of one ot the 
three, who wears a long green shabby coat, for with- 
out this coat there would have been no arrest. For 
Paulding, one of the scouts, had been a prisoner m 
one of the dreadful New York military prisons, and 
had made his escape through the aid of a negro wo- 
man whose sympathy he had won and who had been 
able to give him a Hessian green coat as a disguise to 
escape in-and this coat Paulding was still wearmg, 
and it was this which caused Andre, when unexpect- 
edly stopped here, so near the British lines, to declare 
at once that he was English. 

Immediately above the scene of Andre's capture is 
Sleepy Hollow: name of delicious memory, for this is 
the region where Ichabod Crane seems to be forever 
galloping on, even though the original bridge over 
which he and the Headless Horseman clattered has 
vanished and even though the road itself has here 
been slightly changed from its original line. And 
the name of Sleepy Hollow evokes also the picture of 
others of the Irving creations, for even though they 
did not live precisely here, Sleepy Hollow is the name 
which seems most to represent them. 

The atmosphere of it all is still here, and here is 
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, with its ancient little 
church, and with its names of Dutch magnates of the 

313 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

early days. And that Washington Irving himself is 
buried in this graveyard, not far from the little old 
church, is the finest and sweetest of memories. 

"Here lies the gentle humorist, who died 
In the bright Indian Summer of his fame ! 
A simple stone, with but a date and name, 
Marks his secluded resting-place beside 
The river that he loved and glorified. ' ' 

"A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over 
the land": thus Irving himself wrote of it, and the 
words may still be used, in spite of millionaires and 
non-millionaires, in spite of modern homes and whiz- 
zing motors; for mountain and stream and sky and 
forest still give the region an air of loneliness. 

Ten miles above Tarrytown, on the other side of 
the river, a rocky, thicklj^-wooded, slender-necked 
peninsula juts prominently into the stream: it is 
well above the water, but has no height when com- 
pared with that of the surrounding mountains. Rem- 
nants of fortifications are still plainly to be found — 
and this is Stony Point, the scene of one of the most 
brilliant military assaults of all history. Anthony 
Wayne led the Americans, following a plan carefully 
devised by Washington. ''I'll storm hell if you'll 
plan it ! " declared Wayne ; whereupon, with a twinkle : 
"Hadn't we better try Stony Point first?" 

On the eastern side of the river, diagonally across 
from Stony Point, is a broad low projection called 
Verplanck's Point; and here was a great level drill- 
ing ground, which, more than any other place, is asso- 

314 



UP THE HUDSON 

ciated with the invaluable drilling given to the Con- 
tinental troops by the immensely capable Baron 
Steuben. 

Should you wander over Verplanck's Point you 
would find, for it is of great extent, fields and mead- 
ows and woody paths and clay banks, and here and 
there some shabby ancient house; on the whole, the 
district is not very different from what it was in Rev- 
olutionary days, except that it shows less of comfort- 
able living and more of brickmaking. Looking at 
Verplanck's from the river you see the old-time road 
leading down to the gravelly ferry landing of the old 
King's Ferry, so vitally important in the Revolu- 
tionary War. So much is the present aspect like the 
aspect of the past, that the past seems very, very real. 

The river twists among the mountains, great black 
mountains, massed with trees, that tower up rug- 
gedly from the very water's edge. And of course 
such a wild region, so near New York, could not es- 
cape legends of Captain Kidd and his treasure. 

Among these heights on the western side of the 
river has been built, for miles, a bowlder-bordered 
road of smoothest macadam. It is the Harriman 
Drive; built for the free use of the motoring public. 
Beginning a little south of West Point, it sweeps and 
curves for miles among heights and valleys that have 
hitherto been unknown and inaccessible ; sweeping up 
and around Bear Mountain, it goes superbly on its 
way, amid continuous scenes of beauty and glory, and 
always loneliness, and leads finally to Tuxedo. 

Amid the sternness of the mountains of the Hud- 

315 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

son's eastern shore, as well as on the inland West- 
chester roads and their localities just beyond these 
bordering heights, is the region made memorable by 
Cooper and his "Spy." 







in 




i:J 



316 




CHAPTER XXV 

WEST POINT 

T is natural to think that a spot 
of glorious beauty must be 
connected with only the finest 
of traditions. And this makes 
West Point, notable as it is 
among the world's places of 
beauty, a place unusual, for its 
principal association is with 
the treachery of a trusted gen- 
eral. And it is a curious fact, 
although I think history has 
never given it consideration, that the treachery would 
have been successful had not General Benedict Arnold 
formerly been a resident of New Haven. 

When Andre was captured, Lieutenant-Colonel 
Jameson ordered him and the incriminating papers 
to be sent to Arnold. If this had been done Arnold 's 
treasonable plans would have been carried out. But 
to Major Tallmadge, next in command, the entire 
matter had a different aspect. To Jameson, a pass 
signed by his immediate superior officer, the mighty 
General Arnold, and papers in his handwriting, were 
sacred; but to Major Tallmadge, the important fact 

317 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

was that Arnold, like himself, was a man of New 
Haven. He knevv^ that Benedict Arnold, as a mer- 
chant of New Haven, was the son of a bankrupt and 
had himself afterwards gone through a suspicious 
bankruptcy; and so, now, when traitorous-seeming 
papers written by General Arnold were found on 
Andre, he deemed at once that Arnold was a traitor. 
The fact that Arnold was a powerful general did not 
weigh a particle. Tallmadge was a New Haven man, 
judging in regard to a business man who had made a 
bad reputation in that town, and he protested so 
strongly to Jameson against letting Andre, supposed 
to be a man called Anderson and not known to be a 
British officer, go free, that Jameson yielded; al- 
though his fear of General Arnold was still such that 
he sent him word of the capture of ''Anderson," and 
this warning enabled Arnold to escape to the British 
lines. 

The importance of West Point lay in its command 
of the Hudson, and in safeguarding a passage be- 
tween the New England Colonies and the Colonies to 
the southward. Had the British, holding New York, 
also been able to control the Hudson, the two halves of 
the American Confederation would have been hope- 
lessly separated. 

Washington, as early as 1783, suggested that a mil- 
itary academy be founded at West Point. Not, how- 
ever, until 1802 was a law passed to found an acad- 
emy there, and on July 4th, of that year, it was 
opened. 

Cadets must now enter between the ages of seven- 

318 



WEST POINT 

teen and twenty-two, they must be unmarried and in 
perfect health, and each one is given his training and 
tuition free, with six hundred and ten dollars a year 
in money. Each cadet is on precisely the same foot- 
ing as every other; the richest cannot buy with his 
money any pleasure or luxury not open to the poorest. 

As I think of these cadets, trained to the highest 
possible military perfection, there comes a memory 
of a parade in New York City in which they took part ; 
a woman near me, noticing their superb step and ap- 
pearance, but only half catching what was said by her 
neighbor as to who they were, and taking it for a ref- 
erence to a well-kno^vn part of Long Island City said, 
''Well, them Greenpoint Cadets certainly do march 
fine!" 

When Benedict Arnold came here, he felt actively 
disaffected because of an official reprimand in regard 
to some matter of money. He disliked Washington, 
and thought him unfitted to win. He had plunged 
inextricably into debt. Before he was given the com- 
mand of West Point he had somehow let it be known 
that he was ready to treat with the English. And 
General Clinton sent Major Andre to carry negotia- 
tions to a conclusion. 

It is strange that Andre has been so intensely and 
so persistently idolized. He entered, without hesita- 
tion, into a kind of conspiracy from which a man of 
honor would have shrunk. It was not merely that he 
became a spy. Men of noble ideals have risked their 
lives as spies. But Andre did something far beyond 
this. When aiding a trusted American officer to be a 

319 



THE BOOK OP NEW YOEK 

traitor, he did it under the safe-conduct of that very 
officer. But the white flag, as Washington calmly 
pointed out, was never intended, by military stand- 
ards, to cover dealings of this kind. 

Andre was personally a man of winning personal- 
ity. He danced well. He was a gay acquisition for 
any party of pleasure. He was an excellent com- 
panion. In Philadelphia he had been lionized by 
society. He made sketches and easily wrote a sort 
of verse. And so a great many people were shocked 
by his execution rather than by the revelation of what 
he was perfectly willing to descend to. 

It seems strange that when his verses on **The 
Cow Chace" are referred to, it is only to point out 
that he inadvertently forecast his own fate. But it is 
also well to know that in those verses he so far forgot 
what was due to an enemy officer of character and 
honor, as to imagine, with what the English thought 
transcendent cleverness, General Anthony Wayne, 
than whom a braver man never lived, telling his sol- 
diers to do the fighting while he in safety drove in the 
cows and versifically adjuring them to spare no ex- 
cess in their treatment of the Tories' wives and 
daughters. 

A few words will tell of Arnold's career after his 
treason and escape. He was given, as had been prom- 
ised, a sum of money and a brigadier-general's com- 
mission in the English service: then instead of put- 
ting him aside and letting him bear his commission in 
disgraceful solitude, the English set him at the work, 
of which he greedily availed himself, of burning de- 

320 



WEST POINT 

fenseless Connecticut towns ; lie did not burn quite so 
many as General Tryon had similarly burned, but did 
very well for a man without previous practice in that 
kind of warfare. When the war was over he dropped 
out of sight, joined his wife in England, and after a 
while quietly died. 

Andre was sentenced to death by a court-martial 
whose members were so wisely selected by Washing- 
ton as to include several officers from the armies of 
Europe, including Lafayette and Steuben. 

Most of the buildings of West Point Academy are 
on a level plateau, almost two hundred feet above the 
river. The greater part of the plateau is a broad 
clear grassy space, a magnificent parade ground, of- 
fering an open view up the river, with the buildings 
of the academy fringing the plateau, and with this 
bordering space dotted with elms and maples, many 
of them of great size. 

At the edge of the plateau rises a monument, a 
lofty monolith of polished granite on a tiered gran- 
ite base, and from the foot of this monument is a 
wonderful view of the Hudson, one of the notable 
views of the world. 

The mountains rise on either side of the great broad 
shimmering river. Beyond, in the distance, in softly 
swelling beauty, rises height over height, and the 
river bends and sweeps gloriously. There is not only 
immense beauty in the view but an immense solem- 
nity, grandeur, loneliness ; all is water and rocks and 
trees ; it is as if it were an uninhabited region. Yet, 
it comes to mind that it was three hundred years ago 

321 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

that white men first sailed past this point; and 
thoughts come of those days, when Albany, far above, 
was founded, and for a time was looked upon as more 
promising as a future city than New York! How 
far, far away those early times, those early ships and 
men, seem! — and how busy, at times, has this very 
spot been, with the river full of boats and regiment 
after regiment crossing and camping here ! — and now, 
what loneliness of aspect ! As I look off at the miles 
and miles of splendid wilderness, a train, seeming like 
a toy-train, curves distantly into view and then slips 
quietly out of sight into a tunnel ; a few minutes more 
and a steamer rounds a distant bend and comes on 
prettily down the mighty stream. 

The plateau stands rockily and precipitously above 
the water, and is approached from the landing-place 
at the river's edge by a pleasant up-leading road, past 
massive buildings set with much of mediaeval effect 
against the rocky plateau site. On the level of the 
plateau, where the principal buildings stand, most of 
the old-time buildings have gradually been destroyed, 
within the past quarter century, to make room for 
new structures. 

But on that wonderful plateau one does not much 
look at the buildings; one looks at river and forest 
and rocks — and at the cadets themselves, who, hun- 
dreds of them, come marching splendidly out upon 
the parade. But the World War has taken away 
most of the cheerful aspect of West Point, and given 
it a grimness. 

In every direction there is interest: there is a 

322 



WEST POINT 

Winged Victory by MacMonnies, an admirable and 
high-perched Victory, with an air; a flag flies from 
a tall white flagstaff topped with gold ; the clock-face 
on a square stone tower shows through thick-massed 
branches; cannon balls, relics of the past, are piled 
like the cheeses of Alkmaar Market, and there is an 
enormous chain, made of enormous links, which was 
flung across the Hudson to control navigation at the 
time of the Revolution; it stands curiously for the 
old-fashioned methods of the past — and then one 
suddenly realizes that this represents the most up-to- 
date kind of water defense of even the present 
time. 

This chain, so tradition tells, was seventeen hun- 
dred feet long, weighed one hundred and eighty-six 
tons and was floated down, by means of log-booms, 
from New Windsor, and was here fastened to rocks 
on either side of the river. There was also another 
chain flung across the river here, which was ham- 
mered out, link by link, by blacksmiths of the coun- 
tryside, gathered, at the request of the military au- 
thorities, at Cold Spring. 

There is a monument to Washington, an excellent 
equestrian, set up in 1915, presented by a modest 
donor who does not let his own identity appear but 
who simply describes himself as ''a patriotic citizen" 
and a veteran of the Civil War. There is a monu- 
ment to Kosciuszko, the Polish soldier who came 
across the ocean to assist the American cause, and 
who is principally remembered by the lurid declara- 
tion that ' ' Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell. ' ' 

323 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

(This Polish general was remembered by Brookhii 
in the naming of a street; and Brooklynites love to 
tell that a young policeman, following instructions to 
enter in his notebook every happening or discovery, 
began to write that he had found a dead dog at the 
corner of — and then, looking up at the street-sign and 
seeing that it was Kosciuszko, took the dog by the tail 
and dragged it do^\Ti one block to a street with an 
easier name.) 

Memorial Hall, Grecian in style, with Ionic details, 
is a striking building, built at the very edge of the 
plateau, with its outer half supported by stone abut- 
ments; it is an unusually beautiful building, nobly 
perched, with a superb water-view terrace along its 
outer side. 

The library is of Tudoresque appearance, with dia- 
mond-paned windows and Gothic halls, with not only 
books, but a notable display of portraits of Americans 
of early time in a high-ceilinged notable room. There 
is a "Washington by Gilbert Stuart, and there is also 
a copy of Stuart's General Knox, the original being 
in Boston; and this copy, oddly enough, considering 
that it was made for a military school and is a por- 
trait of the great artillery officer of the Revolution, 
omits the cannon on which Knox's hand, in the orig- 
inal, is resting. 

There is an exceptionally good portrait of Thomas 
Jefferson, a full-length by that notable Philadelphia 
artist. Sully, whose forte was more the painting of 
beautiful women than of men, but who with this pic- 

324 



WEST POINT 

ture of Jefferson achieved a triumph. But the Jeffer- 
son who was an exponent of simplicity and who was 
in the habit of publicly carrying simplicity to an os- 
tentatious extreme, is not here ; it is a different Jeffer- 
son, the Jefferson of the aristocratic and distinguished 
Monticello, a Jefferson in formal court dress; and, 
yet, after all, it is a very simple court dress indeed, 
with black silk stockings, black satin breeches, and a 
long coat worn with a grand air; in all, a long slim 
portrait of the long slim statesman. 

The old quarters of the officers are lined along the 
back edge of the parade ground, nestling at the foot 
of higher hills. They are low-set, broad-hall-in-the- 
middle old homes, big chimneyed, and attractive with 
old shrubs, sweet gardens, and places to sit in the 
shade. 

High perched, part way up a height behind the 
plateau, and surrounded by heavy masses of trees, is 
a great long impressive building, square towered and 
splendidly effective, which gives a marked impression 
of being, in shape and setting, like the ancient Cathe- 
dral of Durham — with the important difference that 
this building is very new. It is the chapel of the 
Academy, and inside, as with some of the English 
cathedrals, it is lined with flags projectively and pro- 
cessionally hanging, very, very still in the still air of 
the great long interior; it is extremely impressive, 
this use of the flags on their staffs, in this old-world 
style. 

Still higher up, mounting the hill that rises behind 

325 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

the plateau, is old Fort Putnam, five hundred feet 
above the river, built in the time of the Revolution, 
afterwards dismantled and fallen to ruin, now re- 
stored, with old moss-grown casements beneath the 
newer superstructure. 

The view from this height is amazing in its sweep, 
and in its impression of profound loneliness. 
Abruptly towering heights rise on the farther side of 
the valley behind. Nowhere, looking inland, away 
from the river, is even a single house or a single 
clearing to be seen. All is unbroken forest on ap- 
parently impassable heights. Whatever may really 
be there — and there is very, very little — is hidden 
from view by the thick-massed miles and miles of 
trees. 

And here within old Fort Putnam I came upon an- 
cient Pan ! He was a lad, scarcely more than a boy, 
lying at full length on the grass, surrounded by three 
or four nibbling sheep and tootling a tune on a flage- 
olet. Looking straight up into the sunny sky, with 
his flageolet — his Pan's pipe! — pointed directly to- 
ward the zenith, he was playing a simple shepherd- 
like air. 

I did not speak to him, I did not ask him where 
he could possibly have come from, with his handful 
of sheep, from among those miles of apparently un- 
broken solitude; it was almost uncanny, and it was 
certainly too picturesque to spoil. I preferred to 
have it remain a mystery. He did not see me. He 
and his sheep were as unconscious of my presence as 
were the ghostly Dutchmen of the presence of Rip 

326' 



WEST POINT 

Van Winkle, and I left him there, with the sheep still 
nibbling quietly about him, and with the simple tune 
still sounding pleasantly, and with his eyes still look- 
ing up into the distant sky. 










V ■: rpii|piii,^^-M|^M_^^-_!.-i. 

'""til ' 



' ^' 



ll(lllt[(l' 



327 



CHAPTER XXVI 



DOWN THE BAY 




LL roads lead to New York I 
Everybody comes here or at 
least wishes to come here, not 
only from all parts of Amer- 
ica, but from the most distant 
points of the earth. Some 
come here without even having 
planned it, as was the case 
with Henry Hudson, who 
found himself most unexpectedly in New York har- 
bor, although under definite orders from his employ- 
ers, their High Mightinesses, who seem to have real- 
ized the lure of Broadway even though it was then 
non-existent, not to deviate from his course toward 
a Northwest Passage. Verazzano, preceding Hud- 
son, was much the same, for, as Mark Twain wrote 
about Columbus, he certainly did not know where he 
was coming and had never been here before. 

Cornwallis tried determinedly to come here, and to 
bring his army with him, but he was unexpectedly 
detained in Virginia. General Burgoyne wanted to 
come; and only the stress of circumstances too pow- 
erful to be resisted kept him away; which is remind- 

328 



DOWN THE BAY 

ful that so great and so clever a man as Bernard 
Shaw, in his play, "The Devil's Disciple," which he 
wrote on America, set down, in all seriousness, that 
Burgoyne marched his army from Boston to Sara- 
toga ! — the kind of mistake which no American would 
be pardoned for making in regard to any important 
campaign in European history. But the English 
never will learn the geography of America! Dick- 
ens wrote, in a very serious part of his very serious 
attack on this country, that he one day crossed over 
from New York to visit an asylum on an island, 
whether Ehode Island or Long Island he had quite 
forgotten — and of course, English-like, he would not 
take the moment's necessary time to look it up in a 
gazetteer. 

But, though Dickens frankly did not care for 
America, but only for American dollars, he himself 
was another of the many who came here. Sir Wal- 
ter Scott had a strong fancy to cross the ocean, and 
almost achieved his wish, for in a trip to the Hebrides, 
during the War of 1812, he saw on the horizon an 
American privateer, and imagined his feelings should 
it capture his boat and carry him to New York! 

Prince William Henry, forty-nine years later to 
become King William the Fourth, came to New York 
to help the English cause, in 1781, but found the cause 
to be in rather a bad way. Freneau, the old-time 
American poet who wrote of the Revolution, versified 
the future King in a poem which described how the 
young man looked about in disappointment at the 
cramped extent of the English dominion, and said : 

329 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

' ' Where all your vast domain can be, 

Friends, for my soul, I cannot see ; 

'Tis but an empty name : 

Three wasted islands and a town 

In rubbish buried — half burnt down, 

Is all that we can claim. ' ' 

William was treated with great deference, on ac- 
count of his relationship to royalty, although it could 
hardly have been thought possible, at that time, that 
he should ever become King. He was dined and 
welcomed by the officers in high command, and it is 
still remembered that one of the houses where he 
was entertained at dinner was the old Kreuzer house 
at West New Brighton on Staten Island, one of the 
buildings, built before the year 1800, which are still 
standing in this city. There are some fifty, includ- 
ing churches and homes, within the entire immense 
area of all Greater New York. 

On the whole the most interesting of the visitors 
to New York, but this perhaps from the romantic 
unexpectedness of it, was Lord Nelson, the great Nel- 
son of Trafalgar. He had not, at the time of his 
visit, fought his great victories, for this was far back 
in 1782, but to find him here, in command of battle- 
ships, during our Revolutionary War, is fascinating. 
He was only twenty-four years old at the time, and 
had recently been in the Bay of Boston, and there 
was pursued and almost captured by the French, as 
I remember reading in one of his letters. Thence he 
went to Quebec, and there received orders to sail, in 
command of a squadron, for New York — and, so he 

330 



DOWN THE BAY 

wrote, it was so cold that the sails were frozen to the 
yards. He spent several days here, and even after 
the departure of most of his squadron for the West 
Indies, remained for a day or two more. 

Always the lure of New York, one sees, and always 
the desire to stay here! Old Petrus Stuyvesant de- 
terminedly came back here to end his days, even 
though he had been deposed from the governorship 
and the Dutch no longer ruled. Governor Dongan 
remained here after his term was over, and would 
fain have stayed longer had he not felt it necessary 
to flee back to England during the Leisler troubles; 
he being that Eoman Catholic governor of the late 
Stuart regime, whose name is still kept in mind by 
the names of Dongan Hills and Castleton, marking 
his oncewhile estate on Staten Island, and kept in 
mind, too, by a tablet on the front of old St. Peter's 
on Barclay Street, just at the edge of the Elevated, 
a very broad church, fronted with stately pillars, 
dating from 1838, but standing on the site of the 
earliest Catholic church in the city, which was built 
in 1786. 

Citizen Genet, the French Minister to America who 
was ordered to return to France on account of his 
insolence and arrogance, and who is generally sup- 
posed to have returned as ordered, was another who 
so loved New York that he did not wish to leave; 
and so he stayed here even though he dared not live 
on Manhattan Island, but retired to a farm, which 
had been given to him by DeWitt Clinton, whose 
daughter he had married, across the East River, in 

331 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

what was in time to become part of New York City. 

Benjamin Franklin was at one time a sufferer from 
the attractions of New York. For he was here in 
1757, with his passage engaged for England on board 
of a ship that was to sail under convoy of the fleet 
of the Earl of Loudon. In daily expectation of sail- 
ing, Franklin and the other passengers remained 
almost constantly on board for more than six weeks, 
and not until that long period had elapsed, with Lou- 
don daily expected to sail but daily finding cause to 
remain, did the Earl at length summon resolution to 
tear himself away and let the fleet sail. 

Among the millions who have come to New York 
only a few can be mentioned. Long ago came here 
that Louis Philippe who was afterwards, unexpect- 
edly, to be King of France, and there also came here 
Joseph Bonaparte, who had been King of Naples and 
then of Spain, but to whom America looked very 
attractive. The great Napoleon himself, after Wa- 
terloo, planned to come here, and what a figure he 
would have made! What strange things he might 
have achieved! It was not his fault that he did 
not come sailing into New York Bay. 

The waterside of lower New York is crowded with 
memories. Here Washington landed on July 25th, 
1775, about where Laight Street now leaves West, on 
his way to Massachusetts to assume command of the 
American army that had gathered for the siege of 
Boston after the battle of Bunker Hill. 

Near Washington's landing-place, it was later 
planned to land and kidnap General Clinton, when 

332 



DOWN THE BAY 

he was in command of the British in New York, and 
the plan fell through only because of the strenuous 
protests of Alexander Hamilton, who urged that 
General Clinton was so incompetent as to do no 
harm, but that a general sent in his place might be 
one of ability ! 

A little nearer the Battery, a landing was to be 
made to capture Clinton's protege, Benedict Arnold, 
who was living with the British down on lower 
Broadway, after his treason: the plan was worked 
out by a soldier who went to the British as a pre- 
tended deserter, and it was frustrated only by Ar- 
nold's unexpected departure on the first of his house- 
burning trips. 

And near this spot, almost precisely a century aft- 
erward, there landed a certain Robert Louis Steven- 
son who, after crossing the ocean in the steerage, 
went to a sailor's tavern on West Street in an open 
wagon, in a drenching rain, and found a place where, 
to wash himself, it was necessary to go out into an 
open courtyard to a tin basin and slippery soap — 
and then he wrote about it and put it in his book, 
*'The Amateur Emigrant," in a way to give the im- 
pression that this was quite a usual manner of re- 
ceiving foreigners in New York, and the kind of ac- 
commodation they were likely to be given; and he 
also wrote of his amazement that he was not well re- 
ceived by publishers and others, when he went and 
stood in their offices (the smell of the steerage still, 
as he says, being on him), with water literally drip- 
ping from him in a circle on their floors. 

333 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Should Tou sail out, yourself, from tkis shore, and 
should your vessel steer for the Narrows, you may 
be going toward either Europe or Coney Island, such 
being among the cheerful possibilities of life open to 
every one and constantly; only this time, let us sup- 
pose you are going just to Coney Island and that you 
are looking at places on the way. In a few min- 
utes you are abreast of the Statue of Liberty, ped- 
estaled on a little island; a Liberty not chic, rather 
dowdy in fact, and yet undoubtedly French, for she 
was sent over to the United States as a gift to this 
nation, by France, in 1SS3. It used to be that West- 
erners were told by their newspapers that the 
statue lighted the harbor with a great glow, whereas 
its light was really very insignificant; but it is now 
lighted with diffused light thrown upon it from be- 
low. 

A few years ago, visitors landing on the little island 
were apt to find themselves caught in little flurries 
of ashes, for it was for a time quite the thing, among 
widows and widowers with cremated partners, to 
mount to the top of Liberty and toss the ashes to the 
four winds. 

Near the tiny islet that holds Liberty, is little Ellis 
Island, where incoming immigrants are examined as 
to health and means and prospects. The American, 
returning home from abroad, has glanced with inter- 
est on the gay and talkative throng of steerage folk, 
and as New York is neared he notices a silence fall, 
and sees the bright-clad foreigners line the forward 
end of the ship, looking, looking, as if striving to 

^334 



DOWN THE BAY 

see what it is that the great city holds in store for 
them; and now and then, as they see towers and 
buildings and bridges, an eager hum arises, and 
sweeps over them, and then sinks into silence; and 
after he has landed, the immigrants are taken back 
to meet the tests of entrance to this, their Promised 
Land. 

At your right, as you approach the Narrows, is 
Staten Island. Over on its eastern side, but out of 
sight from the boat, are the columned buildings of 
that Sailors ' Snug Harbor, for old American sailors 
who should make their life anchorage here. 

Over the low-rolling hills, passing where once were 
great estates and where still stand scatteringly a few 
old houses and taverns and tide-mills, and churches 
that perhaps have silver that was given them by 
Queen Anne, is Tottenville, where there still stands 
the Billopp house, a century older than the Eevolu- 
tion, built of rubble stone, with a line of square two- 
story pillars along its front. Here, in September of 
1776, General Howe, then in command at New York, 
received Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Ed- 
ward Rutledge, who at his request had been sent to 
him by Congress to talk of possible peace. 

It developed that Howe could talk only of the par- 
don of such as should lay down their arms and re- 
turn to kingly allegiance, and as this was not the 
idea of the delegates they returned to their boat, 
Howe accompanying them and expressing his feeling 
that their stand was painful both to him and to 
themselves; to which Franklin, always delightfully 

335 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

ready with good American replies, said that *'The 
people would endeavor to take good care of them- 
selves, and thus alleviate as much as possible the 
pain his lordship might feel in consequence of any 
severity his lordship might deem it his duty to 
adopt." Embarrassed by this, Howe expressed to 
Adams his regret that he could not recognize the 
committee in a public character, whereupon Adams 
promptly replied that he was willing for a few mo- 
ments to be regarded in any character except that of 
a British subject. 

Before going on, and entering the Narrows, you 
will pass the spot where, a century before submar- 
ines came into use, an American inventor showed 
their possibihty. 

The inventor was the versatile Robert Fulton, 
who after going to England and living for a time as 
an art student under that American, Benjamin West, 
whom the English made president of the Royal Acad- 
emy to succeed Joshua Reynolds, turned his mind 
to things mechanical instead of things artistic, and 
invented what he himself termed a '^ submarine boat" 
or ''plunging boat." His experiments convinced 
him that with a submarine and torpedoes he could 
sink ships. Full of the idea and its possibilities, he 
hurried over to France, and blew up in the harbor 
of Brest a boat obtained for experimentation. Fail- 
ing to interest the French, he returned to England 
and in an English harbor showed that, with his sub- 
marine and torpedoes, he could sink ships. Again 
there was no encouragement, whereupon he came to 

336 



DOWN THE BAT 

his native America and in 1807, in the harbor of New 
York, successfully torpedoed an old hulk. But again 
nothing' came of it all. 

In the War of 1812, the English thought of Fulton 
with dread. They remembered his submarine, and 
the memory gave them immense concern. Although 
he made no actual attempt against the British, while 
they had ships in the vicinity of New York, it was 
afterwards learned that his mere presence, with the 
dread that it inspired, materially checked and ham- 
pered the plans of the British commander. In an 
attempt to capture Fulton, British soldiers landed 
one night and surrounded a house where they ex- 
pected to find him visiting, but he was not there. 

Still, America would not adopt his under-water in- 
vention, and, disappointed, Fulton turned his mind 
exclusively to steamboats, after formally writing it 
down as his belief that, in time, submarines would 
revolutionize all warfare. 

On Staten Island, and where he could look out 
upon the Narrows, through which passes the shipping 
of the world, lived for a time, as a tutor, Thoreau of 
Concord, exponent of what is now termed the simple 
life and the *' nature school"; he was a home-loving 
writer, who could at any time pick up material for a 
couple of hundred pages within a walk of a couple 
of miles, and to go as far as New York was for 
him a notable event. 

As we enter the Narrows there are to be seen two 
old-fashioned and pictorial forts; for a fort with 
any appearance of age is always somewhat pictorial ; 

337 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

and in the Xarrows, although not from one of the 
forts, was fired the last shot of the Revolutionary 
War. 

For the British, sailing sulkily away from the city 
they had so long held, and angered by the signs of 
joy on the part of the populace, nailed the British 
flag to the top of the Batterj' flagpole and greased the 
pole below it so that it could not be clunbed ; and their 
chagrin was intense, when, from their departing ves- 
sels, they saw a ready-witted young American, John 
Van Arsdale, s"^iftly mount the pole by nailing cleats 
in front of him, and then remove the British flag, 
which in a little while was replaced by the American. 
The British were so chagrined that, when their ships 
were in the Narrows, and the derisive crowds on 
Staten Island were so close as plainly to be both 
seen and heard, a cannon was fired into the mass. 
But, fortunately, it did not hurt any one, and merely 
showed the English to be bad losers. 

As to Van Arsdale, the honor was given, to him- 
self and his descendants forever, of raising the 
American flag on the Battery on each anniversary of 
Evacuation Day ; and the fine privilege has year after 
year been exercised. 

On Staten Island, not far from Richmond, and on 
a little height, is still to be seen an old-time, star- 
shaped, earthwork fort. Fort Izzard, covered with 
grass and overrun with wild strawberries; a peace- 
ful spot, but meant for serious work when it was put 
up by the British as part of their system of New 
York defense. 

338 



DOWN THE BAY 

On the island there lived, for a time, the Italian 
patriot Garibaldi, who fled to America after a defeat 
in Italy and lived here for a time engaged in making 
soap and candles : the house he lived in is preserved. 

Emerging from the Narrows the boat enters the 
Lower Bay. And over there on the right, on the 
Staten Island shore, is New Dorp, a place of early 
Moravian settlement and still a Moravian town. Its 
earliest church, built in 1763, still stands, although 
no longer used as a church. 

It is always delightful to find an old custom pre- 
served in America, and the Moravians have one of 
the prettiest of old customs ; their sunrise service of 
Easter morning. The people gather in their church, 
decked as it is with Easter flowers, before darkness 
has vanished ; and a service begins ; and as the first 
faint light of coming dawn touches the church win- 
dows, the congregation, with choir and musicians, and 
led by the pastor, walk out, into the ancient grave- 
yard, and there, in the cool, sweet mystery of earliest 
morning, before the sun has risen but when actual 
darkness has gone, the service is sweetly concluded; 
and then the sun, as if waiting for a signal, glowingly 
emerges from the farthest edge of the bay. 

At length your boat approaches Coney Island, 
there at the left on the southern shore of Long Island. 
Your preliminary impression is of low-lying huddled 
structures of frame, with gaudy towers and peaks 
and pinnacles and gaudy roofs, in greens and reds 
and whites and browns and grays, with here and 
there some strange spidery skeleton structure stand- 

339 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

ing up, or some great monstrous slow-turning wheel, 
bearing baskets black with dots that you know must 
be people. The great beach is thronged with people ; 
in the water and on the sand it is people, people, 
everywhere ; indeed the principal and constant inter- 
est of Coney is that of the innumerable people that it 
gathers. 

Coney Island has much that is admirable. The 
first thought is to condemn it, for its noise, its com- 
monness, its cheapness, its garisliness, but the in- 
stant that it is realized that it is the ocean play- 
ground of the public, the only one open to the general 
public, the feeling changes. And that New York has 
so freely bought an immense stretch of beach from 
private o"«mership and devoted it to the free use of 
the public is but one of many admirable features. 

The bathing suits and caps are in gaudy colorings 
innumerable. Every^vhere are life and movement 
and gayety, everj^where distracting noise, every- 
where clamor, everywhere the clash and clang and 
whine and bang of music, everywhere the endless res- 
taurants, everyw^here the cry of pullers-in, every- 
' where dancing and talk and laughter and drums and 
bands and orchestras. Mechanical horses race for- 
ever over long tracks of steel, boats rush down for- 
ever from impossible heights, packed with people 
who forever go shrieking down into the water. 
Everywhere are throngs, on the sidewalks, in the 
streets, in the mighty shows, on the beaches, or jump- 
ing up and down in endless lines in the surf. 

It is blissful happiness ; crass happiness if you will, 

340 



DOWN THE BAY 

but very hnman happiness : it is life, variety, motion, 
endless amusement in endless variety, and all stand- 
ing for happiness. Of course there is also wicked- 
ness, both tucked away and brazen; but on the other 
hand, I have never observed that riches either ex- 
clude wickedness or have any monopoly of virtue; 
and people of perhaps ordinary tastes who earn by 
toil the money to pay for a few hours of diversion, 
may have among them quite as small a proportion of 
wickedness as the wealthy folk, at wealthy watering 
places, who recklessly spend great sums which most 
likely they have not even had any part in earning. 

Size, at Coney, means much. There are dancing 
places of immense area ; there are restaurants of in- 
finite capacity; there are private- shows, which them- 
selves contain immense variety in amusement and 
which represent the investment of millions of dollars 
of capital — and incidentally a high order of brains. 
The mighty beach, the great sea stretching off inimit- 
ably — all is vastness. 

There is a great deal of quiet restfulness to be 
gained at Coney, by tired folk who come here to 
breathe the breezes sweeping straight in from the 
ocean, to bask on the sand in the sun, to soak in health 
from the sea; but the greatest part of the enjoyment 
is taken noisily, feverishly, and in any case always 
happily. 

Far different is this mad, gyrating, garish, danc- 
ing, noisy common Coney from the ordered gayety of 
such a place as the famous Brighton in England, 
with its air of permanence, its primly discreet bath- 

341 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

ing wagous. Different, too, is Couey from the quaint 
semi-freedom of Sclieveuingen, the pictorial ocean- 
side gathering place of Holland. Coney, indeed, is 
in a class by itself. In externals, it is somewhat like 
Blackpool, a resort for the working folk of Liverpool 
and Manchester, but Blackpool is coarser, ruder, 
without the likableness of Coney and without the 
splendor of expense and variety and numbers. The 
editor of a Blackpool newspaper said to me that a 
young woman from New York came there, with a 
friend of his, and that he showed her all the sights. 
^'I took her to pavilions and roller-coasters and res- 
taurants and shows, and I was sure she was im- 
pressed, and she thanked me very prettily, when the 
day was over and she said," thus the editor con- 
cluded with a rueful smile: *' 'Now, when you come 
to Xew York, you must let me take you to Coney 
Island, and I shall show you everything you have 
here — and a great deal more ! ' " 





■i»^ 






CHAPTER XXVII 

IN GEEENWICH VILLAGE 

■HERE two or three 
artists are gathered 
together, there shall be 
a Bohemia in the midst 
of them; or at least 
they shall be in the 
midst of a Bohemia. 
And as there are more 
than twenty-five thou- 
sand who are listed as 
artists in New York 
City, including paint- 
ers, sculptors and 
architects, industrial art designers and commercial 
draftsmen, it naturally follows that New York has a 
Bohemia. In fact, the city has a number of Bo- 
hemias, for it has quite a number of studio centers; 
and some of the groups represent such prosperity 
that Bohemia is lost and one gets barely a glimpse 
of its Coast: for to make the really fascinating Bo- 
hemia custom demands that there be an atmosphere 
of hard work and hard times, or at least a pseudo- 
atmosphere. 
And so, from this, Bohemia has come to be repre- 

343 




THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

sented by Greenwich Village and the vicinity of 
Washington Square — for these adjoining districts 
freely olfer the outward and visible signs expected 
of a Bohemia. There is not too much of uninterest- 
ing prosperity. Art students come here. Begin- 
ners, striving for a foothold in art, gravitate here. 
Cubists and Futurists find lodgment. There are 
also artists. The public come here to catch sight of 
artists and students — and the artists and the students 
are not loth to be seen! It has even been suggested 
that among the real artists and the real students in 
Greenwich Village are some who are but pretenders ; 
some who enjoy being classed as artists and living 
among artists. To say casually, ''My studio," does 
not necessarily mean that it is really used for pic- 
ture-making; it may be merely a place for a pic- 
turesque and picaresque sort of life, very enjoyable to 
the domestically unattached. 

There is an important studio center gathered in 
the general vicinity of Gramercy Park; there is an- 
other important studio center clustered on and about 
West 55th, 56th and 57th Streets; another center is 
some ten blocks to the north of this, another has 
gathered on East 67th and 66th Streets, and Chelsea 
also has a studio center; but most in evidence and 
by far the most in the public eye and mind are the 
studios and little art shops and little restaurants of 
the region of Washington Square and Greenwich. 
And, too, quite a number of writers have gathered in 
this Bohemia, and are as much Bohemians of the 
Bohemians as are the picture-making ones. 

344 



IN GREENWICH VILLAGE 

Bohemia, in this city of change, must needs change 
like everything else. It used to hover, so recently as 
Whitman and the early days of Howells, at 
^'Pfaff's," on Broadway; but it shifted away from 
there, just as it had shifted there from nearer City 
Hall Park, and after a while it shifted to Greenwich 
Village, where there were still to be found old dormer 
windows and even gambrel roofs, old fanlights and 
pillared doorways, and wrought-iron newel-posts at 
the steps of the houses, and fireplaces to make them 
homelike; and if there are not enough of these for 
all to live with, there are enough to look at and talk 
of and sketch and to give that aesthetic atmosphere 
which is the breath of life to these enthusiasts. And 
so, as O. Henry expressed it, *'to quaint old Green- 
wich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunt- 
ing for north windows and eighteenth-century gables 
and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported 
some pewter mugs, and a chafing dish or two from 
Sixth Avenue, and became a 'colony.' " 

All this region has become so permeatively ''Bo- 
hemia" that whereas, in earlier times, people have 
spoken and written of "going do^vn to Bohemia," 
they now merely say, "going down to Greenwich 
Village." Within a few years past, many of the 
interesting old houses have vanished and some of 
the streets have lost their most interesting charac- 
ter, through a mighty sweeping away, mainly for the 
Seventh Avenue extension and its subway construc- 
tion, but there is still much of the interesting left. 

Officially and formally, no Greenwich Village is 

345 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOKK 

now to be found on the map. But in the general 
mind and in general knowledge it is very much on 
the map. Speaking geographically, it is the region 
immediately south of Chelsea, and it might, in a way, 
be said to be the region dominated by the striking 
tower of Jefferson Market. It is a region of delight- 
fully tangled streets which follow in considerable 
degree the haphazard lines of the early village lanes ; 
for this was really a village, in the long ago. That, in 
Greenwich, West 4th Street actually crosses 11th, is 
the last word in unexpectedness ! 

In the very shadow of Jefferson Market tower is a 
fascinating bit, a cul-de-sac, a little back eddy of 
smallish old houses, a tiny court opening directly off 
the busy sidewalk of Sixth Avenue, between 10th and 
11th Streets, in a region of little stores. It is bizarre 
in its unexpectedness : it is a bit of Old London here in 
an extremely busy part of New York : it is a little tri- 
angular space, a flagged courtyard, bordered by a few 
little, neat, quaintish, narrowish old houses: it was 
part of one of the old streets of the village, and was 
left, in its tiny triangular seclusion, when the immedi- 
ate neighborhood was altered, in the long ago, by the 
laying out, with iconoclastic breadth and straightness, 
of Sixth Avenue. It is quite the oddest bit, geograjDh- 
ically speaking, in all New York, and rejoices in the 
name of Milligan Place ; which is not at all a modern 
name, as it merely takes the place of the Milligan Lane 
of early days. 

To begin with, the honorable condition of this Green- 
wich Village, as a place in which to live, is formally 

346 



IN GREENWICH VILLAGE 

recognized in Westminster Abbey. The founder was 
a British vice-admiral who cut quite a brave dash in 
his day, Sir Peter Warren, K.B., M.P. — and with 
doubtless other letters and titles in the usual English 
fashion. He obtained a good bit of land, some 300 
acres or so, and built his house here. 

The name of Greenwich then came naturally from 
the sailors ' Greenwich, on the Thames, and this sturdy 
seaman thought it a pleasant locality in which to end 
his days. He came here some five years before Cap- 
tain Clarke settled at Chelsea ; he w^as not literally the 
first settler here, but the first of any consequence. 

Admiral Warren lies in Westminster Abbey, and his 
tomb is marked with one of the large and ornate mon- 
uments for which that structure is notable. It bears 
an interminable inscription, concluding with the curi- 
ous statement that the "Almighty was pleased to re- 
move him from a place of honor to an eternity of 
happiness"; and any real Greenwich Villager would 
be ready to admit that the ''place of honor" which the 
Almighty had in mind was Greenwich Village ; for the 
artistic villagers are nothing if not loyal. 

Warren's wife was a daughter of the old American 
house of DeLancey, and two of his three daughters 
became the wives of peers ; one being married to the 
Earl of Abingdon, whose name is perpetuated by Ab- 
ingdon Square, here in Greenwich, and another being 
married to Baron Southampton. Even in those early 
days, it will be noticed. New York girls had an attrac- 
tion for the English peerage. That the third daugh- 
ter did not marry a baron or an earl seems to have 

347 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

been because she fell in love with a colonel of the pro- 
saic name of Skinner. But she was by no means 
ashamed of the name, and an important Greenwich 
thoroughfare was named Skinner Eoad; but in the 
course of time it did not seem aristocratic enough to 
newcomers, and, besides, Colonel Skinner had become 
disliked as an American who was an active Tory, and 
so the road became Christopher Street ; a name which 
it still retains. (The *' Skinners" of the Neutral 
Ground, however, in the region north of New York 
City, were not British, but American, and the * ' Cow- 
boys," their antagonists and rivals, were British, al- 
though rejoicing in a name which now seems so dis- 
tinctively American.) 

Old-time mumming is still existent in Greenwich 
Village ; and it is a fascinating survival : it is like some 
old-time custom in an ancient European town. The 
children of the village go out on the streets, on holi- 
days, and particularly on Thanksgiving Day, in singles 
or in parties, mostly in groups of from half a dozen 
to a dozen, some with masks, but most of them with- 
out masks and merely fantastically dressed in simple 
home-made costumes. For the day they have the free- 
dom of the village, and old residents look for them as 
an institution, and kindly white-haired men , them- 
selves relics of the past, emerge out of the past and 
stop them and pat them on the head. Pennies and 
nickels are handed to the children; but that is not 
what they are after; it is not in the least a begging 
matter, and this feature, thus slightly kept up, is but 
a reminder of the old-time custom, in the old coun- 

348 



IN GREENWICH VILLAGE 

tries of the world, of handing out money to mummers 
and masqueraders who came out to make the people 
happy. 

It is a pretty custom ; it is one of the oddest things 
of New York ; and it is to be regretted that a somewhat 
ruder and rougher and less pleasant class of children 
than formerly have within recent years begun to ap- 
pear as the mummers. 

The village long retained an exclusiveness, even 
after New York began to expand, for there was no di- 
rect approach to it on account of streams and canals 
along the North Eiver side of the island, and the 
usual way was to follow up what is now the Bowery, 
and, at where is now Astor Place, go across the island 
to the westward. A yellow fever epidemic of 1822, 
which drew out all the people of New York who could 
possibly get away, gave the first real impetus to the 
growth of Greenwich, for it was deemed a healthful 
locality. Not only did people hurry here in large 
numbers, to escape from the fever, just as they fled 
from Philadelphia to Germantown, but even business 
came, and the name of Bank Street is still reminis- 
cent of the fact that the banks of New York carried on 
their business here, deserting down town, including 
the one which was specifically the Bank of New York, 
the first bank to be incorporated here after the close 
of the Revolution, for it deserted its quarters in the 
made-over Walton mansion on Franklin Square, a 
house which long ago vanished but whose grandeur 
was such as to make it a matter of discussion in the 
British Parliament, and came to Greenwich. 

349 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

Old-time New Yorkers like to tell that a minister 
named Marcellus used to declare to them, when they 
were young, that so great had been the throngs who 
fled panic-stricken to Greenwich, that on one Saturday 
he saw corn growing on a certain 4th Street corner, 
and that on Monday, two days later, he passed by 
again and saw that in that brief time a boarding- 
house had been built, big enough to accommodate 
three hundred people ! And of course, being a min- 
ister and speaking of Greenwich Village, he would not 
exaggerate ! 

From time immemorial it was the custom in New 
York to celebrate election night by bonfires in the 
streets; but gradually the custom fell into disuse 
throughout the greater part of the city, frowned upon 
as it was by the police. But Greenwich Village has 
never been like the greater part of the city. Here, it 
is customary to cling to old customs. And therefore, 
here, the bonfires blazed high and merrily when they 
ceased to burn in other sections. Indeed, there was 
no effort at all to check the election bonfires of Green- 
wich until the stone pavements of that neighborhood 
were largely replaced by asphalt. 

It so happened, that the burning places themselves 
had been fixed by tradition, and that asphalt came to 
those very spots, whereupon it literally became a 
burning question between the Greenwich boys and the 
police. The ingenuity of the boys had always been 
phenomenal in gathering packing-boxes and burnable 
debris and now, to this ingenuity, was added that of 
dodging the police and at the same time having their 

350 



IN GEEENWICH VILLAGE 

fires on the time-honored spots. I remember passing 
one night, at Gay Street and Waverley Place, a huge 
bonfire, with towering flames, and seeing not only the 
customary packing-boxes on the pile, but even trunks 
and chairs and a great old sofa, apparently storage 
loot from some cellar. 

That a large proportion of the inhabitants of the 
village — it is still called Greenwich Village by every- 
body, and not merely by artists as a fad — have con- 
tinued to be an English-speaking people, either Ameri- 
can or folk of English or Irish descent, has aided ma- 
terially in preserving old-time ways. Until quite re- 
cently, and even yet by old-timers, Greenwich has been 
called ' Hhe American Ward, " and this alone is explan- 
atory of much. 

Thomas Paine, of the Revolution, intensely Bohe- 
mian as he was, gravitated naturally to Greenwich, as 
if feeling instinctively that it was to become Bohemia 
a century after his time. A contemporary descrip- 
tion has come down to us of his appearance when he 
lived, with Madame Bonneville, on Henry Street be- 
tween Christopher and Jones — or, as the description 
by present names would be, on Bleecker Street be- 
tween Grove and Barrow. He used to sit, a spectacled 
man, at an open window, with a decanter of brandy by 
his side, a book on the table beside it, his elbow on 
the table, and his chin in one hand and the other hand 
on the book. In the last month of his life he moved 
to the house on Grove Street, just around the corner 
from this, in which he died in June of 1809. Both of 
these houses have disappeared. 

351 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Washington Irving used playfully to say that he 
particularly liked the color of red, because of its 
being the color of his own slippers and Jefferson's 
hair and *'Tom" Paine 's nose. I do not know what 
was the incentive to such inconsequence, but very de- 
lightful the inconsequence seems. 

I remember a description by a contemporary of 
the appearance of Jefferson at a dinner in Greenwich 
Village, when Adams was Vice-President: it was at 
Richmond Hill, at the edge of Greenwich; and Jef- 
ferson was dressed with red waistcoat and red knee- 
breeches, which, with the hair to which Irving so hu- 
morously refers, must have made him a striking object 
indeed. 

Indeed, one thinks of the cheerful lines by Eugene 
Field about any color being the best so long as it's 
red! For at this very dinner the French minister 
wore not only earrings but red-heeled shoes. It was 
a time of colorful possibilities in men's clothes; as 
witness Gilbert Stuart's portrait, pamted in New 
York, of the Spanish Minister Don Josef de Jaudenes, 
now in the Metropolitan Museum, for the portrait 
shows him dressed with much of scarlet gorgeousness. 

Greenwich Village still retains much of its old-time 
charm. Its narrow streets with their totally unex- 
pected angles and turns — Waverley Place frankly 
forks and continues in two directions under the same 
name! — its gambrel-roofed attics, its ancient gables, 
its unmistakable air as of a place different, all give it 
attraction. No wonder it became a haven for the 
young and the adventurous in literature and art. Not 

352 



IN GREENWICH VILLAGE 

only did it offer the desired north windows to artists, 
but windows looking in every conceivable direction 
through the very crookedness and unexpectedness. 
Throughout the region are dotted odd and original 
shops, little shops of individuality, a sort of *' green- 
ery, yallery, Grosvenor gallery" sort of art shop, 
shops where may be seen such curiosity-provoking 
signs as *■ ' Costumes for the Pagan Revel, ' ' or where 
there may be such deliciously startling statements as 
*'The only Art Center in New York," shops of fan- 
tastic and interesting names, shops largely stocked by 
art students and school-of-design graduates, who 
have found increased and unexpected opportunity in 
the lessening of imports of artistic knickknacks and 
decorative objects from abroad on account of the 
war. 

And in Greenwich, and hovering about Washington 
Square — for to this district, in general nomenclature 
and understanding, Greenwich has expanded — there is 
also many a restaurant, quietly housed in old unal- 
tered houses, perhaps with some such name as the 
White Mice, or the Squirrel Hutch, or the Danish 
Oven, or The Jolly Beggars, where there is good food 
at reasonable prices, where there is likely to be a great 
deal of tobacco smoke, where there is wine that at 
least makes up in redness if it chances to miss any- 
thing in flavor, where there is a pleasant atmosphere 
of gayety and mild excitement and happiness, and a 
meeting and greeting of cronies and fellow-craftsmen. 
Some of the restaurants have a Montmartreish-seem- 
ing air. Some display no sign or name at all, ap- 

353 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

pealing to such as are delighted by kuomng of a 
place that every one cannot find. 

The aim at most of these restaurants is to give a 
suggestion of the Italian or French or Dutch, and 
there are Boul' Miche walls or sanded floors or little 
scrubbed tables or ghostly long entries faintly lit or 
queer cellar stairs to descend, to give the zip that 
seems as necessary in Greenwich Village as in their 
prototypes in Paris or Laaren or Munich. And there 
are fine and well-set-up dining places, too, with city- 
wide reputations for their perfect cuisine, restau- 
rants that seem to be bits out of a costly Paris : for 
although the general atmosphere of all this sort of life 
must be that of a shortage of money, there must al- 
ways, at the same time, be places where money may 
be freely spent for the good things of life. 

After all, one finds in any Latin Quarter pretty 
much what he takes there : if he takes youth and ambi- 
tion and happiness, he finds happiness and ambition 
and youth. If he takes a cynical mind and a doubting 
heart, he sees only doubts and cynicisms. 

A difference between this life in New York, of the 
present day, and the Bohemia of not many years ago, 
is that not many years ago there was an older aver- 
age of habitue. Nor do I merely mean that the 
younger people of that day have grown older. I mean 
that this Latin Quarter life used to draw men and 
women of from, say, twenty-five to fifty years, and 
that now its chief appeal is to young folk of from 
eighteen to twenty-five. The older writers or artists 
do not so much frequent these haunts : Greenwich Vil- 

354 



IN GREENWICH VILLAGE 

lage life, in its youthful untrammeledness, has got 
away from them : insurrection is in the air, in art and 
literature, in manners and morals, in life. 

In the past, besides beginners and the seekers after 
the curious and the interesting, many who had them- 
selves done notable things were attracted ; but Green- 
wich Village attracts mainly those whose fame is still 
to be made. Bohemia used to be mostly for men, and 
women went there only to look and to listen: in to- 
day's version of this life, women may be said to out- 
Bohemianize the men — and they are mostly very 
young women indeed, and most of them not long out 
of college, all of them bent on ''leading their own 
lives," as they express it, and many of them staked 
by their families while they dream their dreams and 
keep their shops and write their dramas and their 
scenarios and their poems and their little revolution- 
ary editorials for their own very ''liberal" publica- 
tions. 

Greenwich Village stands for unrest, but it also 
stands for happiness. It gives an outlook upon life. 
It gives music and conversation and touches of res- 
taurant happiness to those who cannot afford the ex- 
travagance of uptown. It gives color to many a life 
that would otherwise be but drab. And it is interest- 
ing to see and to hear Greenwich Village working and 
talking, eating, drinking, dancing, and making merry, 
or taking life seriously. In the studios and in the res- 
taurants you see some who are thrilled and some who 
are amused : you hear eager discussion of everything 
on earth or below or above the earth ; you are your- 

355 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

self amused or interested, you feel tolerant or critical : 
when you must find your way to a restaurant, by dim 
lamplight, through a covered passage and across a 
littered yard, you find it difficult to take Greenwich 
Village seriously : but somehow it must be taken with a 
good deal of seriousness because it takes itself so 
seriously; as when in a restaurant you will suddenly 
hear a young man declaim his own verses, passion- 
ately, to his young companions. 




356 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

WASHINGTON SQUARE 



HE American Revolution gave 
the English an unusual oppor- 
tunity, of which they were 
prompt to take advantage, to 



m 




X'/'?'Jl' •"^''>' ' M. S'^^^ honor to such as are of 



|i!f ni 7/^ what may be called irregular 

Mp^:?^ pedigree; for England does 

j^5Sy%==^ not frown upon irreg-ularity, 

^^^^?nx if it he royal, or even only 

\p noble. 

General Howe, Viscount 
Howe, the commander at New York, was the son of 
an illegitimate daughter of King George the Second, 
which fact made his advancement easy. Admiral 
Howe, Earl Howe, his brother, who brought the fleet 
to New York — and it will be noticed that there was 
never a shortage of titles for the distinguished in 
descent — ^was equally fortunate in winning place 
through the same royal connection. General Bur- 
gojTie was not so fortunate as to be left-handedly re- 
lated to royalty, but this omission was graciously 
overlooked in consideration of the fact that he was 
left-handedly the son of a lord. 

The royal governor of New Jersey, William 

357 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Franklin, was the illegitimate son of Benjamin. And 
that the future William the Fourth was here during 
the Revolution seems only natural when it is remem- 
bered what left-handed additions he was himself to 
make to the British peerage. 

I shall not look into the entire list ; but it may be 
mentioned^ in passing, that although the gallant 
Percy, afterwards to be Duke of Northumberland, 
who so bravely fought America, was legitimate, his 
brother, who after the Revolution became associ- 
ated both picturesquely and importantly with the 
United States, was but his left-handed brother after 
all. 

Lord Cornwallis seems to have been of pedigree 
irreproachable : and yet, there comes to mind a curi- 
ous story. When his son was to marry the daugh- 
ter of the celebrated Jane, Duchess of Gordon, he, 
Cornwallis, broke off the match, telling the duchess 
frankly that it was on account of the insanity that 
would be inherited from her husband. Whereupon 
the duchess told him, plainly, that he need have no 
fear, as there was not a drop of Gordon blood in her 
daughter's bod}^ At which, the loser of Yorktown 
unhesitatingly allowed the marriage to proceed, not 
objecting to actual illegitimacy so long as the form 
of respectability was observed. 

Nor does this story come from some American 
source. It is on the authority of Samuel Rogers, the 
poet, than whom no man was ever more British in 
feeling ; and he tells the story with glee. 

In his more than ninety years of life, always meet- 

358 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 

ing the most interesting people, what myriad stories 
Rogers heard, what friends and acquaintance he 
made, in what a vast number of homes he was enter- 
tained ! And one of his comments, as he neared life 's 
close, remains especially in the memory, because, al- 
though he was himself not thinking of New York, 
but only of his beloved London, it sets forth one of 
the most vital differences between New York and 
London. For his comment was, that to any Lon- 
doner who has reached an advanced age, a walk 
through the streets of London is like a walk in a 
cemetery, because he passes so many houses, now 
inhabited by strangers, where he used to spend happy 
hours with those long since dead and gone. 

But nobody could write thus about New York, for 
in this city not only have the people of the past gone, 
but the houses in which they dwelt have long since 
also vanished. Indeed, there is only one region left, 
where an American, old enough to look back like 
Rogers, over nearly a century of life, could find the 
homes of friends of long ago, and that district is 
Washington Square. 

A few other cities, notably Boston and Philadel- 
phia, profoundly possess what may be termed the 
feeling of home respectability, that feeling of family 
pride which comes from permanence of home, but in 
New York there is a complete absence of this feeling, 
except in Washington Square. To have a house in 
Washington Square, and to be able to say that you 
inherited it, marks the highest point of social ex- 
clusiveness. 

359 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

Speaking generally, in New York a man must 
stand on his own legs and not on those of his grand- 
father. There is little of ''family," as the term is 
generally understood. It is not a factor in everyday 
life. Washington Square is the only part of the city 
which gives a background suggestive of family and 
of old-time descent. 

It is, too, the spot in all the city which best retains 
the old-time picturesqueness ; and this although it is 
only, after all, the northern half which has fine old 
homes. The northern part is of such strength and 
dignity that it dominates. The ordinary park has 
air; but Washington Square has atmosphere. 

The square itself is a great, sweet area, thick with 
elms and sycamores, and has long been the part of 
New York most often made use of by story writers, 
not necessarily to point a moral but certainly to 
adorn many a tale. But whereas it used to be that 
every author used to have a heroine on the north side 
of the Square, it has suddenly become the custom to 
write of the southern half, with its connection with 
Latin Quarter life, and with the tenement dwellers 
sweeping up from the southward against it. It was 
long ago that Bunner, in his once famous ''Midge," 
chose, for the house that was that story's setting, a 
gloomy old iron-balconied dwelling now at the edge 
of where Sullivan Street has been cut through to the 
Square. And Townsend, he of "Chimmie Fadden" 
fame, once wrote a short story, "Just Across the 
Square," in which with tragic insight he made the 
north and south sides react upon one another. 

360 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 

The Washington Arch at the center of the north- 
ern side, the fine old houses, which are wealth and 
social standing personified, the Italians from the 
nearby tenements — it is the combination of all this, 
and an atmosphere of distinction, that give Washing- 
ton Square its charm. 

On the south side of the square, looking out over 
the greenery at the Arch and the old mansions, stands 
a church, the Judson Memorial, designed, in beautiful 
Italian style, by Stanford White ; he loved the tawny 
yellow buildings of old Italy, and loved to follow 
them, and this represents his finest tawny-yellow tri- 
umph. The campanile, with its arcaded summit, 
rises Giotto-like, with its use of Giotto's ideas of the 
relative size of tower windows, with small ones at 
the bottom and large ones, increasingly, toward the 
top. And every night, as it has done every night 
during the quarter of a century that the church has 
stood here, a cross of light shines on the top of the 
campanile. 

It is one of the facts that illustrate the changes that 
have come in New York life, that when this church, 
with its Italian style, was built, no Italians, or prac- 
tically none, lived near by, but that gradually they 
have filled up the tenement streets immediately to 
the southward to the practical exclusion of other 
races. And off at one side of the Square, a Garibaldi 
stands pedestaled, with half drawn sword in hand 
as if with some thought of holding this district for 
the Italians forever. 

Many French used to congregate near the square, 

361 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

nor have they even yet entirely disappeared under 
the preponderance of the Italians, and I remember 
noticing a Fourth of July meeting here, with the 
Declaration of Independence read in French and a 
fiery address delivered in Italian by a grandson of 
Garibaldi. 

Near the church, on the southern side of the 
square, is a day nursery, with its lower floor iron- 
latticed, and as evening approaches it is a sweet and 
at the same time a pathetic sight to see the little chil- 
dren swarming and climbing on this lattice, looking 
out eagerly for their returning mothers. 

In the spring, many birds come here, and, in par- 
ticular, scarlet tanagers love, in mid-May, to make 
the square their stopping-place for a few days, flit- 
ting about, among the greenery, in a glow of such 
vivid beauty as to seem unreal, as to seem, indeed, 
here in the heart of New York City, almost a vagary 
of the imagination. 

The fine old houses are not really so very old, al- 
though they carry themselves with such an air of 
established permanence. They are not Colonial: in 
period they are not even of that early nineteenth cen- 
tury which gave so many notable dwellings to other 
of the Eastern cities. They are of a date subsequent 
to 1825 ; most of them of the early 1830 's ; some of the 
'40 's. After all, it really would not do to have the 
buildings too old which are most markedly typical of 
the best of New York. 

The glimmering greenery, the lushness of growth, 
rouse thoughts of the tens of thousands who were 

362 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 

carelessly put here to sleep their last sleep beneath 
where are now the grass and pavements of this 
square ; it has been estimated, but personally I feel a 
little doubt of the figures, that more than one hun- 
dred thousand paupers were buried here ; at any rate, 
there were very, very many. Before it was Wash- 
ington Square it was the Parade Ground, and before 
that, until the 1820 's, it was the city's Potter's Field. 

The stately houses look statelily over the once- 
while pauper burial-place, aristocratically uncon- 
scious of anything disagreeable in the past. They 
are houses of aloofness: quite superior to what 
might repress the pride of houses of weaker char- 
acter. 

I mention what was here in the past, not only be- 
cause it was a striking feature of the city's develop- 
ment which set the most exclusive Knickerbocker 
families looking over a great Potter's Field, but also 
because it points out, to use a famous Tennysonian 
couplet. New York's method of ''rising on stepping- 
stones of its dead selves to higher things," and be- 
cause it is always well to remember that it is the 
present that counts, not only with squares but with 
individuals, and not the past. 

In 1830 Washington Square witnessed a curious 
celebration. It seemed to New York, for some in- 
scrutable reason, that it ought to meddle with Euro- 
pean affairs by celebrating the dethronement of 
Charles the Tenth, King of France, which had taken 
place in that year, and so a procession marched from 
the Tammany Hall of that day to Washington Square, 

363 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

and here there was a great meeting, presided over by 
Monroe of the Doctrine, who was then a resident of 
New York, and in the group on the platform were 
gathered a few most curiously notable men : for there 
was Alexander Whaley, who long before had been 
one of the *' Boston Tea Party," and there was 
Enoch Crosby, who had been in the secret service in 
the Revolution and was supposed to be the original 
of the hero of Cooper's then world-famous book, the 
**Spy," and there was John Van Arsdale, who had 
climbed the Battery flagpole and taken down the 
British flag on the day of the Evacuation of New 
York, and there was Anthony Glenn, a Revolutionary 
officer bearing the American flag which he had 
hoisted in place of the one that Van Arsdale brought 
down, and there was David Williams, one of the three 
scouts who had captured Major Andre. Aaron Burr, 
one notices, was not invited. What a fascinating 
group they made, those ''venerable men who have 
come do^vn from a former generation." How the 
very thought of it brings up pictures of the great 
events in which they had taken part, half a century 
before they thus came together in Washington 
Square ! 

Following the Spanish War, the Seventy-first 
Regiment came back to New York, bearing their dead. 
On the way to their armory they marched through 
Washington Square, and I remember what a hush 
fell as they approached the Arch. Between throngs 
of bareheaded men, and women in whose eyes shone 
tears, the soldiers slowly marched. The Dead 

364 



WASHINGTON SQUAEE 

March sounded solemnly. Then there was but the 
muffled beat of drums, the slow footfalls of the sol- 
diers, and now and then the gentle clink of steel. A 
profound silence fell upon the crowd as the colors 
passed, all draped in black, and then came the slow 
rumbling of wheels, as the flag-wrapped coffins, upon 
caissons, went by. Many an important parade has 
passed through Washington Arch, but none can dim 
the memory, for those who saw it, of the home-com- 
ing of the Seventy-first. 

But, turning from serious matters, it is a delight to 
think of the Washington Square pump of long ago. 
For in defiance of the laws of hygiene, of all consid- 
erations of health, of the laws of sanitary science, as 
the present day understands hygiene and health and 
sanitary science, the favorite drinking water of these 
fashionable folk, before the days of Croton water, 
came from a pump that stood just a trifle to the east 
of the base of the Arch. Even after the Croton water 
was really in the houses, in the 1840 's, it was with 
reluctance and only gradually that the use of this 
pump was relinquished — and all this although the 
antecedent use of the square was of common knowl- 
edge. The water was supposed, and no wonder, to 
have a piquant tang of individuality, which made it a 
rival of the famous Tea Water Pump at the corner 
of Roosevelt and Chatham Streets which was pas- 
sionately held by its devotees to supply better tea 
water than any other pump in the city. In early 
days, preceding the advent of Croton, the Manhattan 
Company operated a water system through a consid- 

365 



THE BOOK OF NEW YOEK 

erable part of the lower New York of that period ; and 
the upper part of the city, which then meant, say, 
Greenwich Village, Washington Square and there- 
abouts, had the opportunity to get water from a sup- 
ply that was gathered in cisterns where Jefferson 
Market now stands and from there was pumped to a 
reservoir at what is now the corner of Broadway and 
13th Street. But it was hard to lure New Yorkers 
away from street pumps, which had been set up, 
through the early city, at intervals of about four 
blocks. 

Behind the stately homes of the north side of the 
square is a sort of circumscribed spaciousness, giv- 
ing openness of air and aspect and sunlight, and the 
rear windows of the hjouses look down over smallish, 
ordered, walled-in gardens, into Washington Mews, 
behind the houses east of Fifth Avenue, and into 
Macdougal Alley behind those west. 

The Mews, retaining its old-fashioned designation 
from the days of horses and carriages, is now within 
great iron entrance-gates, and has largely been given 
over to artists' studio-homes, which are picturesque 
in the extreme, in blendings of soft grays and greens, 
and with enclosed and formal gardens — which show 
what all New York could do if it chose ! — between the 
new studios facing into the Mews, and a line of beau- 
tiful studio buildings, also recently built, and inten- 
tionally of old-European eifect, facing on Eighth 
Street. 

Macdougal Alley has also become a studio resort 
for sculptors and artists, and a '^festa" given there 

366 



WASHINGTON SQUAEE 

for the Red Cross attracted the attention of the en- 
tire city, and of every visitor, by the triumphant 
transformation of a narrow way, lined with plain 
little buildings, into a bazaar and plaisance of de- 
light, with pinnacles and tow^ers of beauty. 

The "Washington Square mansions are not nearly 
so costly, not nearly of so great size, as are the more 
ostentatious mansions of upper Fifth Avenue and 
Riverside, but they hold their own with distinction. 
**Prue and I" used to see diners-out go trippingly 
down the steps of these sober-fronted mansions as 
evening approached. And only last evening, as I 
passed one of the broad-fronted old homes, the owner 
and his wife went down the steps and crossed the 
sidewalk to their waiting motor, walking on a long 
red velvet carpet which had been laid for them, al- 
though the steps and sidewalk were absolutely dry: 
and the motor, with two liveried men on the box, 
rolled away, and two other liveried men, bent double, 
walked backward, heavily drawing in the rich carpet 
which had kept the shoes of wealth from the contami- 
nation of stone: and I could only think of "The 
tender and delicate woman among you, who would 
not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the 
ground for delicateness and tenderness" — But 
that, with the somber summary of what would follow 
from pride, was written well over three thousand 
years ago ! 

Henry James, in his novel of ''Washington 
Square," pictured Doctor Sloper, in 1835, building 
himself "a handsome, wide-fronted house, with a big 

367 



THE BOOK OF NEW YORK 

"balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a 
flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal 
which was also faced with white marble"; this struc- 
ture and its neighbors being "ver}' solid and honor- 
able dwellings," and Washington Square securing 
through them "a kind of established repose." 

There is a mellowness about these homes, an air of 
leisured ease, of serenity, of tranquillity, which are 
the more to be remarked from being in a city not 
notable for tranquillity, serenity or ease. There is a 
classic dignity about them, with their straight roof 
lines, and their attic windows looking out through 
open-work grills of Roman-key, and their balustrades 
and rails, their large-windowed, broad-fronted ampli- 
tude. They are sedately charmiug and sedately 
aloof, with their white marble steps leading up to 
their fine doorways, with straight-edged sidelights 
and overlights; with glimpses of great broad vesti- 
bules in exquisite creamy white, of silver doorknobs, 
and of great staircases. In the narrow spaces be- 
tween house-fronts and sidewalk — for the houses all 
stand aloofly back — is pleasant greenery, with little 
evergreens and box; and one old box-bush still re- 
mains, a survival of the past. And up the fronts of 
a few of these old brick houses still rise old wistaria 
garlands, the typical and greatly loved wistarias of 
an earlier New York, that gloriously toss their purple 
plumage in the air of spring. 

The effectiveness of the square is due in great de- 
gree to the beauty and the dignity and the noble open 
setting of the two houses at the Fifth Avenue corners ; 

368 



WASHINGTON SQUARE 

and the final touch of felicitousness was given to it 
when Washington Arch arose, in all its fine brave dig- 
nity, its captivating charm. 

For the dedication, in 1889, of the temporary arch 
which immediately preceded this arch of white gran- 
ite, New York arranged a program which followed so 
far as possible the events of 1789 which marked the 
beginning of the United States as a nation under a 
Constitution. President Harrison came to the city, 
and was landed as Washington on his coming had 
been landed, at the foot of Wall Street, on the East 
River. He went to church service, as Washington 
had gone to service, at old St. Paul's on Broadway. 
But when he came to Washington Square to preside 
at the dedication of the commemorative arch, he came 
to a place which in Washington's day was existent 
only as uncultivated fields. 

The present arch, honored by New Yorkers above 
anything else in the city, is especially to be honored 
for the words which it bears imperishably across its 
top ; a motto to be read by looking up from the open 
square, on the southern side of the memorial ; for the 
words are those of Washington's nobly imperishable 
adjuration : 

' ' Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the 
honest can repair. ' ' 




INDEX 



— A.— 

Accidents, street, 246 

Allen Street, 116 

Andre: capture of, 313; with 
Arnold, 317, 318, 319, 320; 
slandering Wayne, 320; exe- 
cution of, 321 

Appellate Court building, 150 

Aquarium, the, 38 

Architects: Cram, 192; Mc- 
Comb, 64; Renwick, 191; Up- 
john, 45, 171, 172; Stanford 
White, 121, 149, 150, 160, 361 

Arnold, Benedict: 317, 318, 319, 
320. 333 

Arthur, President: home of, 31; 
statue of, 151 

Ascension, Church of the, 171 

Astor Place, 102 

— B.— 

Bacon, Lord, 12 

Bancroft, George, 17, 47 

Bartholdi, 154 

Battery, the, 34-40, 338 

Baxter Street, 83 

Beecher, 291 

Bible House, 85 

Billop house, 335 

Blackwell's Island, 100, 148 

Blennerhassets, the, 74, 287 

Block, Adrian, 3 

Bohemia, 343, 345, 354, 355 

Bonaparte: Joseph and Jerome, 

275 
Booth, home of, 161 
Borouglis of New York, 4 
Botanical Gardens, 296 

371 



Bowery, the, 81-87, 153 

Bowling Green, 40-1 

Bowne house, 293 

Brevoort, 169 

Bridges, 68-9 

Broad Street, 53-56 

Broadway, 70-71, 98, 213-227 

Bronx, the, 294, 295 

Brook Farmers, in New York, 
258-9 

Bryan, William Jennings, 154 

Bryant, William CuUen, 17, 18, 
188, 228 

Bunner, 29, 39, 360 

Burr, Aaron: on the Battery, 
35; at trial of Weeks, 64, 65; 
charm of, 285 ; his quarrel and 
duel with Hamilton, 281-3; 
marriage with Madame Jumel, 
277, 289; his power in the 
courts, 282; home of, 284; his 
projected empire, 286, 287; 
visit to Europe, 288-9 

Burr, Theodosia, 35 

— C— 

Cardiff Giant, 39 
Carnegie, home of, 197, 198 
Castle Garden, 37, 38, 39 
Cathedrals: Episcopalian, 271; 

Roman Catholic, 100, 191; 

Russian, 136-8 
Cemeteries: Marble, 32; old 

Jewish, 86; St. John's, 75; 

Trinity, 48-50; in Brooklyn 

and Queens, 293 
Charities, 25.3-7 
Chatham Square, 85 
Chelsea, 164-7 



IXDEX 



Cherry Hill. G7 

"Chesapeake" and "Shannon," 49 

Chinese quarter, 117, 139-142, 
23S-240 

Churches and chapels: St. Bene- 
dict the Moor, 245; St. 
Esprit, 299: St. George, 163; 
St. Mark, 3, 89-95: St. Pat- 
rick, 76-7; St. Paul, 57-59; 
St. Paul Eastchester. 295; St. 
John, 72-5; St. Peter, 331; 
St. Thomas. 192; Ascension. 
171; Collegiate. 190: First 
Presbyterian, 172; German 
Reformed, 268; Grace. 77-80: 
Little Church around the 
Corner. 173-6; in the Fort. 
190; Madonna di Pompei, 75: 
Madison Square, 149; Mora- 
vian, 339 : Judson Memorial, 
361; Quaker, 163; Trinity. 
45-51 ; Our Ladv of Lourdes, 
138 

Cincinnati, Society. 124-7 

City Hall, 59-65, *67 

Claremont, 264 

Cleopatra's Needle, 202-4 

Clinton, De Witt. 63, 263, 331 

Clubs: Bread and Cheese, 188; 
Friendly, 187: Lotus. 189; 
Metropolitan, 187; National 
Arts, 161; Players', 161; 
Princeton, 161 ; Salmagundi, 
187; Union, 189; University, 
190 

College of Citv of New York, 
272 

"Colonel Carter," 28, 30 

Collegiate Church, 190 

Colonnade Row, 22 

Columbia University, 262-3 

Coney Island, 339-342 

Conkling. 151 

Cooper, J. Fenimore, 188, 189, 
316 

Cooper Union, 87-8 

Cram, 192 

Crawford, F. Marion, 29 

Croton water. 365 

Crystal Palace, 182 

37: 



Cunningham, Provost, 50 
Curtis, George William, 173, 

258, 259, 367 
Customs, old, 246, 348 

— D.— 

Dana, Charles A., 253 

Davis, Richard Harding, 29, 105, 

171, 174 
Delmonioo's. 76, 155 
De Pauw Row, 121 
Dewey, Admiral, 37 
Dickens: and Irving, 23; Lind- 

ley Murray's ghost, 205 ; 

literary banquet, 156; his 

American geography, 329 
District Leaders, 128^133 
Division Street, 115 
Dobb's Ferry, 311 
Dongan. Governor, 331, 191 
Drake, Joseph Rodman, 24, 25 



-E.- 



Edward the Seventh; in New 
York when Prince of Wales, 
47 

Evictions, 118-9 

— F.— 

Farragut. 150-151 

Federal Hall, 51 

Fifth Avenue, 103, 104, 150, 168- 
204 

Fifth Avenue Hotel, 150 

Flushing. 293 

Fort Izzard, 338 

Fort Washington, 265-267 

Forty-Second Street, 181, 182, 
183 

Foundling Hospital, 256-7 

Franklin: in New York, 332; 
Elizabeth Schuyler, 280; re- 
ply to Howe, 335: statue of, 
186 

Fraunces Tavern. 55 

Prick. H. C, home of, 197 

Fulton, Robert, 336-337 



INDEX 



Furniture, early American: in 
City Hall, 64; in Metropolitan 
Museum, 201 

— G.— 

Gallatin, 48 

Gardiner, Julia, 22 

Garibaldi, 339, 361 

Genet, Citizen, 331 

George, Henry, 70-80 

George the Third; lead gtatue 

of, 41-43 
Goelet mansion, 104 
Golden Hill, 18, 19 
Governor's Room, 61 
Grace Church, 77-80, 169 
Gramercy Park, 159-162 
Grand Central Station, 212 
Grand Street, 115, 122 
Grant: home of, 31; tomb of, 

261 
Graves : Drake, 24 ; Gallatin, 48 ; 

Grant, 261; Hamilton, 48; 

Irving, 314; Kearney, 49; 

"Boss" Kelly, 76; Landais, 

77; Lawrence, 49; Monroe, 



King's College, 263; General 
Clinton, 333; portrait of, 62; 
desk of, 64; marriage of, 280; 
quarrel and duel with Burr, 
281-3; funeral of, 285; grave 
of, 48; monument to, 284 

Harlem, 270-271 

Harlem Heights, Battle of, 262 

Harriman Drive, 315 

Hebrews, 83, 86, 107-109, 122-3, 
143, 167, 236 

Hell Gate Bridge, 68 

Henry, O., 345 

Hispanic Museum, 264 

Hotels, 169, 179, 180, 220-221, 
248 

Houdon, 201 

Howe: General and Admiral; 9, 
335, 357 

Howells, William Dean, 28 

Hudson, Henry, 91, 328 

Hudson Park, 75 

Hudson River, 302-317, 321 

Huguenots, the, 297-9 

Hutchinson, Anne, home of, 295 

— I.— 



32; Montgomery, 57; Nor- 
deck, 59; Osborne, 49; Roche Illegitimacy, and British gen- 
Fontaine, 59; Sloughter, 95; erals, 357-8 
Stirling, 49 ; Stuyvesant, 94 ; Inman, portraits by, 62 
Charlotte Temple, 49; Tomp- Irving, Washington: 13, 18, 189; 
kins, 95; Revolutionary pris- birthplace of, 19; Central 



oners, 49, 50 
Greeks, the, 117, 142 
Greenwich Village, 343-356 

— H.— 



"Hail, Columbia!" 52 

Hale, Nathan, 65 

Halleck, Fitz-Greene: City Hall 

verse, 2 ; lines on Drake, 25 ; 

"Marco Bozzaris," 25; at 

Jumel mansion, 278; portrait 

of, 185 
Hamilton, Alexander: home on 

Broadway, 45 ; home on Wash- — J. — 

ington Heights, 283; mobbed, 

54; at Weeks trial, 64-5; at- James, Henry, 28, 46, 367 

373 



Park, 17; Knickerbocker His- 
tory, 19, 20; meeting with 
Washington, 21 ; Colonnade 
Row, 21, 22; home on Irving 
Place, 22; admired by Scott 
and Dickens, 23; "Tom" 
Paine, 352; John Howard 
Payne, 23; the Bronx, 294-5; 
home at Irvington, 311-12; 
Sleepy Hollow, 313; grave of, 
314 

Italians, 143-6, 235, 236, 361 

Izzard, Fort, 338 



INDEX 



Jaudenes, 352 

Jefferson, Joseph, 86, 174-5 

Jefferson, Thomas: portrait of, 

324; costume of, 352 
Jefferson Market, 346 
"Jerseys, The," 294 
Jones, John Paul, 76-7; statue 

of, 201 
Judson Memorial, 361 
Juuiel Mansion, 272-278 
Jumels, the, 275-278 

— K.— 

Kent, James, 188 

Kidd, Captain, on Wall Street, 

53 
King, Rufus, home of, 293 
King's Ferry, 315 
Kipling, 70, 71 
"Knickerbocker," 19 
Knox, General: 85, 252; portrait 

of, 324 
Kosciuszko, 323, 324 

— L.— 

La Farge, 171 

Lafayette: love for New York, 
1; visit in 1824, 36-7; statue 
of, 153; portrait of, 185; at 
Jumel Mansion, 275 

Lafayette Place, 21 

Landais, Pierre, 76-7 

Lansing, Judge, 64-5 

Lawrence, Captain James, 49 

Leisler, Jacob, 65-67 

Liberty, Statue of, 154, 334 

Lights, the, of New York, 221- 
227 

Lincoln: at Cooper Union, 88- 
89; statue of, 155 

Lind, Jenny, 38 

Litchfield, 42 

Little Church around the Cor- 
ner, 173-6 

— M.— 



Madison Square, 16, 147-152 
Madison Square Garden, 149 
"Manhattan," 5 
Manhattan Bridge, 68, 80, 87 
Marble Cemeteries, 32 
"Marco Bozzaris," 25 
Markets, street, 112-115 
May Day parties, 199 
McAuley, Jerry, 255 
McComb, John, 64 
Metropolitan Life Building, 

147-9 
Metropolitan Museum, 200-2 
Milligan Place, 346 
Minetta Lane and Street, 75 
Monroe, President: home of, 31; 

where buried, 32 
Montgomery, General, 57-9 
Moore, Clement C, 165 
Moravians, the, 339 
Morgan, J. P., 53, 164, 212 
Morris, Roger, 273, 308, 309, 310 
Morse, S. F. B., 184-6 
Mulberry Bend and Street, 82, 

112 
Murray Hill, 205-212 
Murray, Lindley, 205, 206 
Murray mansion, 206 
Murray, Mrs., 210 

— N.— 

Narrows, the, 337, 338 

National Arts Club, 161 

Nelson, Admiral, at New York, 
330 

New Dorp, 339 

New Rochelle, 297-299 

"New Woman," the, 250 

New York: boroughs of, 4; pop- 
ulation, 5; seal of, 10-12; plan 
of, made in 1811, 14-17; lit- 
erarj'- characteristics of, 27 

"Night Before Christmas," 165 

Ninth Regiment, 155 

North River, 302, 303 



Macdougal Alley, 366 
MacMonnies, 65, 323 



374 



— 0.— 

"Old Homestead, The,'* 78 



INDEX 



Oldest house in New York, 293 
Osborne, Sir Danvers, 49 
Our Lady of Lourdes, Church of, 
138 

— P.— 

Paine, Thomas, 297, 298, 351, 
352 

Parkhurst, Dr., church of, 149 

Paulist Church, 258-9 

Payne, John Howard, 23, 24 

Pelham Bay, 295 

Pennsylvania Railroad: hotel of, 
180; station of, 216-7 

Perry, Oliver Hazard, 63, 64 

Philipse, Frederick, 309, 310 

Philipse Manor Hall, 304 

Philipse, Mary, 273, 304, 300- 
309, 310 

Pirates, 53 

Players' Club, 161 

Plaza, the, 192 

Plymouth Church, 291 

Poe, 26, 27, 75 

Population of New York, 5 

Portraits: Clinton, 63; Halleck, 
185; Hamilton, 62; Jaudenes, 
352; Jefferson, 324; Lafayette, 
185; Perry, 63; Mary 
Philipse, 304; Seward, 62; 
Van Buren, 62; Washington, 
61, 184, 324; in Philipse 
Manor Hall, 310; in Public 
Library, 184-6; early sale of, 
182 

Prison ships, British, 292 

Prospect Park, 291 

"Prue and I," 173, 259, 367 

Public Library, 183-186 

Pumps, 365 

Putnam, General, 125, 208-9, 
211 



-Q.- 
Quaker Meeting House, 
Queensboro Bridge, 68 

— R.— 
"Raven, The," 26, 75 



163 



375 



Real Estate, 251-2 

Renwick, 191 

Richmond Hill, 284 

Riots: Doctors', 101; Bread, 
102; Draft, 102; Astor Place, 
102 

Riverside Drive and Park, 259- 
265, 304 

Rochambeau, 311 

Roebling, 69 

Roosevelt, birthplace of, 31 

Russian brass trade, 116; cathe- 
dral, 136-8 



-S.- 



Sailors' Snug Harbor, 254, 335 
St. Esprit, Church of, 299 
St. Gaudens, 45, 150, 192 
St. George's Church, 163 
St. John, Cathedral of, 271 
St. John's Chapel, 72-5 
St. John's Park, 72, 74 
St. Mark's Church, 3, 89-95 
St. Paul's, 57-9 
St. Paul's Eastchester, 295 
St. Peter's Church, 331 
St. Thomas' Church, 192 
Schwab, home of, 198, 260 
Scott, Sir Walter, 20, 280, 329 
Scott, General Winfield, 47 
Sculptors: Bartholdi, 154; Hou- 
don, 201 ; MacMonnies, 65, 
323; St. Gaudens, 45, 150, 192 
Seal of the City, 10-12 
Secession proposal, for New 

York, 7 
Seventy-first Regiment, 364 
Seward, 62, 151 
Shaw, Bernard, 329 
Shops, 249, 250; Allen Street, 
IIG; brass, 116; Division 
Street, 115; specialties, 190; 
department stores, 249; pic- 
turesque, 249 
Sickles, General, 170 
Signs, 244-6 
Sleepy Hollow, 313 
Slocum fountain, 119 
Sloughter, Governor, 66, 95 



INDEX 



Smith, F. Hopkinson, 28, 29, 30 

Standard Oil Company, 44 

Staten Island, 331, 335, 337, 338, 
339 

Statues: Arthur, 151; Colum- 
bus, 39; Conkling, 151; Far- 
ragut, 150; Franklin, 180; 
Garibaldi, 361 ; George the 
Third, 41; Hale, Nathan, 65; 
Kosciuszko, 323; Jones, Paul, 
201; Lafayette, 153; Liberty, 
154, 334; Lincoln, 155; Pitt, 
41 ; Seward, 151 ; Sherman, 
192; Sigel, 260; Stuyvesant, 
94; Verazzano, 39; Washing- 
ton, 52, 153, 201, 323 

Steuben, Baron, 125, 269-270 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 333 

Stirling, Lord, 49 

Stock Exchange, 54 

Stony Point, 314 

Studio quarters, 158, 159, 172, 
344, 366 

Stuart, Gilbert, 184, 324, 352 

Stuyvesant Petrus, 89-96, 271, 
331 

Stuyvesant Square, 162-4 

Submarine, of Fulton, 336 

Sully, 324 

Superstitions, 231-240 

— T.— 

Tallmadge, Major, 317, 318 

Tammany, 124-134, 292 

Tappan Zee, 311, 312 

Tarryto\ra, 312-314 

Taylor, Bayard, 39 

Temple, Cliarlotte, 49 

Tenement District, 107-123 

Tennyson, 49 

Terry, Ellen, 10 

Thackeray: dinner to, 28; opin- 
ion of Ne^v York, 9; a Pick- 
wickian adventure, 10; on 
Broadway, 70 

Tlieaters, 219-220 

Tilden, home of, 161 

Tombs, the, 84 

Tompkins, Governor, 95 

37 



Tompkins Square, 119 

Tottenville, 335 

Townsend: "Just Across the 
Square," 300 

Trinity Church, 45-51 

Trollope, Mrs., 12 

Trumbull: portrait of Washing- 
ton, 61 ; of Hamilton, 62 

Twain, Mark, 170, 184 

Tyler, President, 22 

— U.— 

Union Square, 152-7 

"Unrest," the, 3 

Upjohn, Richard, 45, 171, 172 

— v.— 

Van Arsdale, John, 338 
Van Beuren house, 105 
Van Bibber, 171, 174 
Van Buren, portrait of, 62 
Van Cortlandt Mansion, 278 
Van Vredenburgh, 40 
Verazzano, 3, 39, 302 
Verplanck's Point, 314 
Visitors to New York, 216 

— W.— 

Waldorf-Astoria, 179 
Wall Street, 44, 51-55, 164, 302 
Wallabout Bay, 292 
Warren, Sir Peter, 347 
Washington Arch, 168, 361 
Washington, George: and Gen- 
eral Howe, 9; meeting Irving, 
21; his dogs, 9; his Battery 
walk, 34 ; inauguration of, 52 ; 
at Fraunces Tavern, 55, 56; 
his pen, 59; his desk, 64; 
portraits of, 61, 184, 324; 
statues of, 52, 153, 201, 323; 
landing in New York, 332; in 
Chelsea, 166-7; his attention 
to clothes, 126, 279, 307; in 
1775, 101; his signature, 124; 
on Murray Hill, 207-211; the 
early shad, 229; on Cherry 



6 



INDEX 



Hill, 67-8; at Fort Washing- 
ton, 266-7; at Jumel Mansion, 
273, 274; at Van Cortlandt, 
279; and Anthony Wayne, 
314; and Mary Philipse, 304, 
306-9; imperishable words of, 
369 

Washington Mews, 366 

Washington Square, 29, 359- 
369 

Wayne, Anthony, 314 

Weeks, trial of, 64-5 

West Point, 317, 327 

White, Stanford, 121, 149, 150, 
160, 361 

Whitman, Walt, 70, 292, 303 

William the Fourth, 329-330 

Williamsburgh Bridge, 68, 112 



Winthrop, Theodore, 29 
Wolcott, Oliver; the George the 

Third statue, 42-3 
Wolfe; his lost monument, 242 
Wood, Fernando, 7 
Woolworth Building, 60 
Worth monument, 152 

— X.— 

— Y.— 

Yonkers, 304 
Yorkville, 270 

Zoological Gardens, 296 



377 



